More than 100 high-school scholars invaded the ISU campus this weekend to participate in the College of Engineering’s Scholars’ Day.

Scholars’ Day, which was the final event of National Engineer’s Week, brought 125 National Merit, National Achievement, National Hispanic and College of Engineering scholarship recipients to Iowa State. The participants learned what it’s like to be an ISU engineering student.

“Scholars’ Day is a comprehensive visit that is unique to ISU,” said Monica Bruning, outreach and recruitment coordinator for the College of Engineering. “Engineering is an awesome, fulfilling career field, and we were able to show our prospective families that.”

Of the 340 prospective parents and students who came to Iowa State Saturday, half were from out of state. There were also 27 female students and 25 minority students in attendance, which officials said was far more than attended last year.

The day opened with a four-person round table discussion lead by James Melsa, dean of the College of Engineering. During the discussion, ISU students talked about many things that prospective students wonder about, such as reasons to attend Iowa State, how and why they chose their particular branches of engineering and other extracurricular activities.

Melsa said the purpose of the panel was to let prospective students know that “engineering isn’t just about studying, and that you can be involved in extracurricular activities too. We wanted them to see that while engineers study hard, they play hard too.”

The panel was followed by informational sessions that covered all of Iowa State’s eight areas of engineering.

“The sessions were about current, cutting-edge engineering and engineering research that is occurring at ISU,” Bruning said.

She said the sessions, conducted by ISU engineering faculty, addressed topics such as bone implants, e-commerce and engineering, food engineering, biotech crops, information warfare and “smart” materials.

“We really brought the university to them,” Bruning said. “We also wanted to break down the perceptions of attending a large university. We want to communicate to them that big is good. Iowa State has the ninth-largest engineering college in the nation, but the interaction is still there as well.”