Dear Fellow Alumni and Friends,

Our summer is already in its final weeks.  New students will be arriving in about a month, and we are well into planning our Fall semester.  We have a lot of exciting things coming our way, and I am looking forward to the students being back…it gets way too quiet around here! 

I hope you enjoy this issue of The Good Word.  You’ll find in it some short recaps of a number of our events from the Spring Semester.  We just closed our books for FY 2015-2016, and we had our best fundraising year ever—still a gap, but it’s getting more manageable.  I want to thank all of you who have assisted us so generously this past year. 

Our pastoral lackey, Kyle Simonis, who will be headed to seminary in a few weeks, prepared an amazing presentation for new and prospective Georgia Tech students about the Catholic Center and our activities. Click here or on the picture below to view it, and please send it to anyone you know who might be considering Georgia Tech!  Also, please let any freshmen you might know and their parents that we will be hosting an Open House on Move-In Day (Thursday, August 18) from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.  We will have refreshments and would love to meet new students and their families.

Football season will be starting soon.  Don’t forget to check our website for Mass information on football days!
 
 
To Hell With georgia,
Fr. Josh

Edward Dannemiller, Physics '13


 

The Catholic Center was a home to me during my time at Tech. I have many fond memories of tailgates, community dinners, praying rosaries, and serving at Mass. After the 5:30 daily Mass there would always be groups going to eat; the first years usually bound by a meal plan to go to Brittain. No matter where we went, we would wait until everyone got their food and then we said grace together. It was a small thing, but it made a big impact on me. From this gesture I began to learn that while my faith is deeply personal, it is not meant to be private. I learned that faith is not reserved for an hour on Sunday, but is meant to bear upon every moment. I learned what is was like to be in community of faith, to be surrounded by men and women who were seeking to live what they believed.

Since graduating from Tech, I joined the priestly formation program for the Archdiocese of Atlanta. Though I still have five years before, God willing, I am ordained; these past two years have been incredible. I have worked in parishes in Conyers and Dawsonville, I have gone on a mission trip to Peru, I have prayed with the homeless on the streets of Chicago, and I managed to pick up a Master’s in Philosophy and Religion from Mundelein Seminary.
 

While I have grown a lot since Tech, so much of what I am doing now is just building on what I had started doing at the Catholic Center. Being a part of the Catholic Student Organization’s board helped me when I was working in parishes. Going service trips with the CC prepared me for Peru and Chicago. Late night conversations with Techies about faith and life helped me when I was studying philosophy.

Currently I am preparing to attend the Pontifical North American College in Rome to continue my formation for the priesthood. I will take with me my many fond memories of the Catholic Center, and I will pray that God would complete the good work He has already begun.

 

 

It started as a spinoff from an undergraduate research project. I do research at the Emory Center for Rehabilitation medicine and found out that balance is a key biomarker for neurological health, but the average clinician doesn't have very sophisticated tools to assess balance. There was no diagnostic device that bridged the gap between research-grade equipment and simple, easy to use clinical assessments. I brought this idea to Garrett Wallace, a fellow BME that I met through a mutual friend at the Catholic Center. With the help of a few more friends, an idea for a portable balance testing device took shape. The Wobble is a portable perturbation platform that uses motion actuation and sensors to assess balance. Force sensors track the subject’s center of pressure, and this information can be used to evaluate how effectively the brain and muscles respond to perturbations.

We placed second in the Georgia Tech Inventure Prize and won $10,000, a free patent filing, and a spot in Flashpoint, a GT business creation and innovation program. This fall we will be working on a pilot study with two local high school football teams to try to identify balance problems caused by concussions. I am so grateful for this experience and I am especially grateful for the support of my friends from the Catholic Center because it was a pretty hectic semester. My friends kept me accountable for coming to daily Mass and adoration even when school and InVenture threatened to swallow up all my time. I like to joke that we are great student entrepreneurs, except for the "student" part. 

Teresa Prieto, AE '16
 

We’re excited to report that as of the end of May we're at 93% of our goal of $360,516! Our fiscal year ends in June and we hope to be able to close that gap. Through May, 457 individuals and families made contributions to our ministry. We are deeply grateful and humbled by our donors' generosity and commitment to our ministry. You all are cherished members of our GTCC family and we pray for you and your intentions daily in our Mass and Rosary. Your gifts are invaluable as we work to build our Catholic faith in the hearts of the students of Georgia Tech. Once again, thank you for supporting our mission!