Flying Tomatoes and a Golden Calculator:
It Must be National Engineers Week at UCSD

Ioana Patringenaru | February 19, 2008

Students look at a giant balloon during last year's E-Games on the Warren Mall.

Click here to learn
more about Engineers Week at UCSD

Today, while you’re walking around Warren Mall, you may be wondering why tomatoes wrapped in insulation and tape are falling from a giant balloon floating in the sky. “And what’s with the mobs of laughing people and the huge golden calculator trophy?” you might find yourself asking.

The answer is simple: you’ve just happened on E-Games, held to kick off Engineers Week at UCSD. During the event, Jacobs School of Engineering undergrads face off in a three part design competition in a quest for “the golden calculator.”

The golden calculator – according to the student-run E-Games blog is a “TI-83 [that] holds the power of all graphing calculators no matter the model number or even brand. Thus any who are in possession of its ‘awesomenessity’ will gain unimaginable calculating fortitude.”

If a glimpse of the quest for the golden calculator isn’t enough, there is also an engineering student organization fair where you can find out about life as an engineering major, a challenge course and a free barbeque organized by the Triton Engineering Student Council (TESC). (Learn about E-Games 2007 here.)

One of the goals of Engineers Week at UCSD is to call attention to the contributions to society that engineers make and to highlight that fact that many of the most pressing challenges facing the United States and the world can be addressed through engineering.

Tackling these challenges will require an engineering workforce that is as diverse as the human population at large. Getting and keeping young people interested in engineering is one way to promote a diverse workforce in engineering. Jacobs School undergrads are working toward this goal with their ENSPIRE event on Wednesday when 400 8th graders will romp through campus and participate in a design contest, making Wednesday no less lively than E-Games Tuesday.

"Given the need to increase and diversify the engineering workforce in the United States, it’s important to get kids excited about engineering early on."

Pershing and Gompers middle schoolers will be touring some of the hottest engineering labs on campus before competing in their own engineering design contest using household items. ENSPIRE is organized by TESC and other Jacobs School student organizations. The Jacobs undergrads have taken it upon themselves to give local eighth-graders the chance to see the engineering side of college life.

“Given the need to increase and diversify the engineering workforce in the United States, it’s important to get kids excited about engineering early on,” says Jeff Mounzer, TESC president and Jacobs School undergraduate.

The organizers are trying to round up as many UCSD students to serve as volunteers as possible.

“What could be more fun than working together to teach younger students the enjoyment of engineering?” a Jacobs School undergrad asks on the ENSPIRE blog.

Students will be vying for the Golden Calculator.

Thursday, Engineers Week turns to the big-top tents that will pop up on Warren Mall like mushrooms. The tents will fill with Jacobs School graduate students and their research projects. It’s a grown-up science fair and an important chance for the students to interact with the local and regional business communities, future employers and potential sources of venture capital (Click here for a venture capital success story at Research Expo). UCSD students, faculty and staff are welcome to wander through the posters from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. Thursday.

At the Jacobs School, research is not just for graduate students. The undergraduates will strut their data and stats at EUReKA (the Engineering Undergrad Research Konference and Assembly) in the lobby of Center for Magnetic Recording Research and give rapid fire oral presentations starting at 10:30 a.m. in room 2512 of EBU1.

Friday is job fair day thanks to TESC, which runs the annual career fair extravaganza called DECaF. With more than 90 companies on the way, the Price Center is going to feel pretty caffeinated despite the decaf name. Recruiters representing all disciplines of engineering will be talking to students and looking for the right match for full time jobs as well as internships and summer jobs.

For an inside look at what it means to put on a massive job fair and a long list of associated career development workshops while you’re an undergrad, check out the DECaF site as well as the DECaF blog. Here’s a light-hearted look at mail merge from the DECaF blog:

“Imagine having 200+ professors that you want to personally email to invite to an event of yours, like the Dining Etiquette Workshop. And you obviously don't want to start out “Dear Professor” because then they’d just write you off as another one of those “generic email writers.” What can you do? Mail Merge lets you write and format an email invitation in Microsoft Word, personalize that email to a specific professor that you’ve listed in Microsoft Excel, and it emails your invitation to every email on that Excel Document through Outlook! Ingenious I know. So you’re like “So What? I don’t really think professors care that much about having a personalized email, what’s the point?” Well imagine having a gazillion industry representatives and recruiters and officials whom you want to email to come to DECaF. Yes, let’s just put ALL their emails in one “TO:” box and send it out. Yaknowadimean?”

Still looking for more? The student engineers are also throwing an engineer’s ball called Impulse on Friday night.