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February 23, 2007 Vol. 77,
no. 6S
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| NUMBER
ONE: From left, Frank Dollar, Elena Perez and Artemio
Navarro celebrate their Academic Olympiad win in January.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY HES
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Cal team wins national Academic Olympiad competition
Three engineering seniors won the Society of Hispanic
Professional Engineers’ Academic Olympiad competition last month,
beating out seven teams from across the nation in a game show–style
competition that tested their knowledge of everything from statics
to organic chemistry to Hispanic history. The winning team members
are ChemE senior Elena Perez, ME senior Artemio Navarro and Eng. Physics
senior Frank Dollar.
“We were extremely excited to find out we had won,” says Perez. “Our
chapter has usually done well at regionals, but we hadn’t won
nationals in a while. We just wanted to do well.”
To prepare, Perez, Navarro, Dollar and CEE senior Nicolas Gutierrez
(who competed in regionals and was the alternate for nationals) reviewed
engineering textbooks and materials. But their main asset was their
different fields of study. After each question and its possible answers
were read at the competition, Navarro hit the team’s buzzer and
the three consulted with each other, drawing on their knowledge of ChemE, ME and engineering
physics. Dollar, who was the designated speaker, had 15 seconds to
give the team’s answer. As they proceeded through three rounds
of questions, the team accumulated points.
For the final round’s one question, the remaining three teams––Cal,
UCLA and Illinois––had to bet points on whether they’d
get the right answer. Not only did they have to nail the answer, but
they had to plan strategically, that’s so even if they got the
answer wrong, they’d still have a shot at winning. Perez, Navarro
and Dollar bet 698 of their 1400 points. When UCLA (who bet zero of
their 900 points) and Illinois (who bet all of their 1200 points) gave
wrong answers, the three had won.
“It was nerve-wracking,” recalls Perez. “Plus, Artemio and
Frank had been up late the night before working on projects for other
competitions. We were so glad we were successful.”
The Academic Olympiad was just one competition held during the society’s
National Technical and Career Conference, which took place in Denver
this year. Cal teams also competed in design, technical paper and poster
competitions.
The team of ME seniors Artemio Navarro, Muna Okochi and Pedro Gomez
and IEOR senior Noe Lozano won third place in design for their project, “FasPark.” The
project “eliminates the nightmare of finding a space in a busy
parking lot by assigning drivers to the closest available space to
a desired entrance,” Lozano explains, “through a network
of proximity sensors and a shortest-path algorithm.”
For most members who attended, the highlight was the huge career fair
and networking opportunities. “Many of our members got interviews
and multiple job offers,” Perez reports, who will be starting
her own job after graduation as a facilities engineer at an oil company.
For more information, go to http://hes.berkeley.edu.
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