Technically Excellent at the Quebec Engineering Competition

Posted by Skrud at Wednesday, January 30th 2008 at 12:15am

I attended the Compétition Québecoise d’Ingénierie as an afterthought. I wasn’t originally planning on going, given that January is the busiest month of the year for me. But when Wally asked me to join the team for Consulting Engineering, I figured that since it’s my last year of school I may as well try to get as much out of it as possible and signed up. We won the preliminary/practice round at Concordia, and so we qualified to compete at CQI.

“Consulting Engineering” is this: You and your team are locked in a room for 6 hours with a case study problem statement which includes a ton of data. You have access to a computer, but no access to the internet. There is an intranet forum where teams can ask questions (and of course, other teams can see your questions and the subsequent answers from the judges). Your team’s goal is to put together a presentation (to be presented the next day) and an “Executive Summary” document outlining your solution to the problem given, along with its economic feasibility, rationale, calculations, and everything.

Our team of four (Wally, Kevin, Greg and myself) spent our six hours trying to determine whether a small fleet of oil tanker ships would benefit from traveling through new routes in Canada’s north as oppose to through the Panama canal. The new routes were shown to be shorter, but we would need to factor in the costs of reinforcing the ships hulls to withstand potential iceberg collisions, as well as a the risk involved should a collision occur and oil were to spill into the sea. Thus we also needed to design a collision detection system and a spill recovery system to deal with these scenarios.

We crunched numbers like there was no tomorrow. This is where I started to find myself being useful. I don’t know how to calculate shear strength of steel or the forces of heavy oil tankers as they act on gigantic icebergs, but I can use computers. I monopolized the computer, basically tabulating everything imaginable into an Excel spreadsheet using the numbers and equations my team were feeding me. I actually got to row AB. I’ve never gone anyway near row AB before. Our “Executive Summary” therefore consisted of some formulas (typeset in the new Office 2007 equation editor) and some tables copied and pasted with data from excel, but stylized with Word 2007’s autoformatting tools. And our powerpoint presentation? Well, the template was provided to us by the talented Nik Brovkin, but the content was thrown together in five minutes and prettied up with Smart Art.

And now I understand what “Consulting Engineering” really is: professional bullshitting. We pulled numbers and equations out of our ass. We took the data we were given and manipulated it every way imaginable. It was no real surprise when, at the end of the 6 hours, we were showing a net profit of over $21 billion. And then we put the data tables into our presentation and handed them in, keeping a copy for ourselves. Back at the hotel, we were reflecting on our numbers and practicing our presentation when our wits started to come back to us …. $21 billion is way too much. So we recalculated our numbers. It turns out that I had put a minus sign in the denominator of an equation instead of a plus sign. This made our numbers astronomically large. Oops.

Now we were faced with a dilemma. Do we present the numbers in our presentation, since we can’t change it, and act confident about it? Or do we come clean and say that we made a mistake in our calculations, and give the judges the new numbers? We decided to go for honesty. When it came time to talk about the data, I said “Being responsible engineers, we made sure to double check our calculations again and again. And while we were going over every last detail of our data, we noticed that we had made an error in our presentation, and the numbers in one of these data tables are grossly exaggerated…”. Believe it or not, this seemed to earn us major points with the judges. When we mentioned that it was a little error of a minus instead of a plus in the denominator, they gave us a knowing smile as if to say “yup, that happens all the time …”

We walked out of that presentation with a good feeling.

Later that night at the banquet, we had our hopes up. We thought that might be in a position to actually win an award. But we were still shocked when we were called up as the winners of the special award for Technical Excellence. This is an award that could have gone to any team at CQI, from any category. And yet we got it. Wow. We went back to our tables pretty satisfied, and we had the slight feeling that our award was nothing more than a consolation prize. Which means we were really surprised when we called up because we finished in 2nd place overall for Consulting Engineering.

The first and second place teams from each competition get to advance to the national level: the Canadian Engineering Competition. This is huge. Not only did our team place second, but Concordia’s Senior Design team placed 1st. This is apparently the first time Concordia’s ever had teams to send to the CEC, and we’ve got two. I can’t even begin to describe how proud I was to be a part of all of this, and how proud I am of my team.

I will now share with you our two secrets to success.

1. We all went to the RnD party at ETS the night before our presentation.
2. We demolished a mickey of vodka immediately before our presentation. It took just the right amount of edge off.

However, the CEC takes place from March 6th to 9th … which will be the subject of my next post.

Tags: canada, cec, competition, concordia, cqi, eca, engineering, qec, quebec 4 comments