Calculating Group Plots Fun : Academia: UCI students crown nerds and let off steam at an annual comic ritual, Engineering Week.
IRVINE — Faster than a speeding calculator. More powerful than a binomial. They can leap tall stereotypes in a single bound.
They are the the engineering students of UC Irvine. More reliably than the return of the swallows to San Juan Capistrano, you can count on UCI each year to celebrate engineers’ special contributions to fashion and culture with Engineering Week and the Crowning of the Nerds.
The zany activities began Monday and peaked (or perhaps piqued) on Wednesday with the annual nerd contest. Jared Welz, 21, an electrical engineering student from Seal Beach, won the nerd title after reading his soulful poem entitled “Integrals, I Love You,” an ode to a mathematical operation used to calculate the area under a curve.
Faculty and students gathered at the campus Engineering Plaza at noon Wednesday to watch. Welz stumbled to the microphone and blinked through thick eyeglasses, which were held together, of course, with adhesive tape.
“Uh, I thought this was a poetry contest,” Welz mumbled. He then read his poem, part of which follows:
Integral, I love you so
If you were a computer, I’d program you
If you were a woman, I’d probably be rejected by you
But since you’re my integral,
I’ll integrate you and love you all day long
I have nothing against derivatives
They’re lots of fun too But they don’t give me that warm and fuzzy feeling
That all my integrals do....
The crowd enthusiastically applauded, and Welz’s victory was assured. It also helped that only one other student competed.
Art Cabanban, 22, of Irvine, a member of the Engineering Student Council, said he’s not sure why most students this year avoided the nerd contest. “I guess they’re getting tired of looking like nerds and feeling like nerds,” he said.
The term nerd is loosely defined, but at UCI it generally denotes an engineering student who slicks back his or her hair, carries a plastic pocket protector for pens, and wears ill-fitting clothes and broken glasses.
The runner-up 1993 nerd, Ed Rands, 21, a civil engineering student from Irvine, said the nerd image really isn’t true for engineers.
“In the engineering community, everybody is fairly normal,” he said. Pausing, Rands added: “But maybe I’ve become more nerdy over the years and haven’t realized it.”
Rands jumped into the nerd contest at the last minute. With a grin, he said: “I just had to be real spontaneous and think of how I see most of the people around here.”
Rands improvised by readjusting his clothes and wearing his glasses upside down. Welz prepared in advance. His hair was slicked back in an oily look, and he wore broken glasses, pants hiked up high over his white socks, and a paper toilet-seat protector around his neck.
Welz also picked up his books and raced off after reading his poem. But that wasn’t part of his nerd act. He yelled that he was late for a class.
Other Engineering Week contests on Wednesday included the engineering obstacle course and the Rube Goldberg contest.
Contestants in the obstacle course started with a plastic-sack race. They then had to carry a Ping-Pong ball, balanced on a spoon held in their mouths, as they ran an uphill course. Finally they had to dribble a basketball through a maze of street cones and shoot into a garbage can. Students said all this involved many intricate engineering skills.
Jorge Blanco, 24, a mechanical engineering student from Hawthorne, won the obstacle race. Asked for his key to victory, Blanco responded: “I bribed the officials at the bottom of the hill.” But a student standing nearby disagreed. “He won because he cheated with the Ping-Pong ball,” said the student, a note of admiration in his voice.
The Rube Goldberg contest this year focused on a great social problem: the need for an invention that would squeeze toothpaste from a tube and put it on a toothbrush.
Mark Pontius, 21, an electrical engineering student from Long Beach, explained his Rube Goldberg entry: “The more steps you have, the better it is. It’s like the old Tom and Jerry cartoons where you have 20 steps to catch a mouse.”
Pontius’ invention indeed had many steps. The process began with a toy electric car and ended with a toy robot making a noise as it held a toothbrush aloft to catch newly squeezed toothpaste.
More events are yet to come before Engineering Week concludes with the annual banquet Saturday night at the University Club.
