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May 15, 2006 Vol. 77, no. 15S
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| ON FRIDAYS
AT 6:10 p.m.,
the distinctive bells at the top of Sather Tower, better known as
the Campanile, ring out over campus. It’s a live performance
by a small, select group of Berkeley carillon students. One of
those is ME/MSE senior Justin Kaderka. “The first time
I played, this huge sound came out above me. Wow, it was really
powerful,” he recalls. (Photo provided by Siu-Ting
Mak) |
Senior
moments from Engineering News
Class of 2006 takes the proverbial spotlight and makes College headlines
The stats are stellar. For the fourth year in a row, Berkeley Engineering
took first in the NATCAR competition held each spring at UC Davis.
In NATCAR, student teams develop small-scale electric cars that drive
themselves efficiently around a preset, wired path. The fastest car
wins. The team led by Quan Gan, an EECS senior with an ME minor, placed
second behind another team of — you guessed it — EECS seniors
from Berkeley.
While other seniors face the challenge of finding a job or applying
to graduate school, 22-year-old ME senior John Makar faces his mortality. “I
came to terms with it before I signed the contract,” says the
Army ROTC graduate, who will be serving four years in the Army, most
likely heading to Iraq, he says.
Last summer, BioE senior Angela Wu rubbed elbows with a bunch of poets,
though not the literary kind. Wu was an undergraduate researcher in
BioPOETS, also known as the Biomolecular Polymer OptoElectronic Technology
and Science group, led by BioE associate professor Luke Lee. “What
I’m doing is essentially applying drugs to see how they might
affect the cells in our bodies,” she explains. “It’s
a pretty new field, and I like the novelty of it. It’s a great
way to learn things.”
A team of ME seniors (all men, most now alumni) are promising peace
between the sexes with their new design, called the Hands-Off Toilet,
a bathroom system that automates raising and lowering the toilet seat
and flushing process. “We did it so the women would stop complaining,” explains
ME senior Eustaquio Alfonso Carrillo, chuckling.
The CEE undergraduate team that produced several designs for a suicide
barrier on the Golden Gate Bridge achieved yet another success. The
group’s paper has been accepted for publication by the American
Society of Civil Engineers’ Journal of Architectural Engineering.
Team members include CEE senior Doug Wahl.
On one of his first days volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, ME
senior Peter Do helped frame a roof. He’d never framed a roof
before. “When I got there, there was no roof,” he says. “When
we left at the end of the day, we’d built the roof truss. It
was very satisfying.”
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