Graduate school is not always just hard work. On March 9, the CSE Department proved this by holding a Scavenger Hunt Challenge for undergraduate students in order to promote the graduate department.
The challenge lasted for about 2 hours and was followed by a lunch and an awards ceremony. The grand prize was a watch with a GPS tracker, which was donated by Garmin.
The event was made possible by support from the Graduate Student Association and the Graduate Recruitment and Outreach Sub-committee.
CSE students learned that the field is more than just coursework and that the industry has a large impact on real-world problems.
Each of the labs were manned by graduate students which had a related challenge to their work. These included:
EsQuaReD Lab: Human-Computer Interactions to create a 'tornado' on a computer
NIMBUS Lab: Fly a remote control helicopter and land it on stationary and moving objects
Cyber-Physical Networking Lab: Triangulate to locate prizes with sensors
Constraint Systems Lab: Solve Sudoku puzzles
Holland Computing Lab: Create a program to manage the supercomputer
Intelligent Agents and Multi-agent Systems Group: Find out how many firefighters are needed to put out a virtual forest fire
This year's winners were:
#1. Ryan Dutoit, Matthew Lickei, Joseph Lunde, Kevin Rock $50 each.
#2. Clayton Brady, Toan Nguyen, Bin Chen, Leon Zhang $30 each.
#3. Tai Lee, Anthony Vicente, Zeth Schlenker
#4. Bjorn Barrefors, Steven Johnson, David Shriver, Rrezarta Krasnicki
"The event is a win-win situation for both research labs and undergraduates", says Soh. "The labs get to showcase their research and find promising students while the undergraduates get to enjoy the hunt, lunch, prizes, and
get to socialize with the graduate students, while finding out more about the cool projects that our graduate students are doing."
LD Miller, a current graduate student and participant, says, "The fast-paced nature of the scavenger hunt required graduate students to provide a fast, high-level summary of their work. Now, this fast summary helped prevent the prospective students from getting bored. However, developing a high-level summary is also useful for graduate students when trying to explain their work to those not intimately familiar with it such as committee members and grant reviewers."
Soh says, "It is my hope that this becomes a popular and meaningful tradition at CSE."
The event is open to all undergraduates in the department. We also have participation from visiting students interested in our graduate programs.