(g) SWE Student Technical Presentation Competition
Any undergraduate Student Member is eligible to submit a techical paper for the regional written competion. One finalist is selected from each region to compete at the national Student conference in an oral competition. Three national winners are selected at the Student conference.
(1) Schedule
April 1: Deadline for technical papers to be received by the student's appropriate Regional Coordinator.
May 1: Finalists notified that they have been selected on the basis of their submitte papers to compete in the oral portion of the Competition
June: The finalists will compete by presenting their papers orally in the Technical Presentation competition at the National Student Conference.
(2) Eligibility
Any SWE Student Member in good standing, i.e. whose dues are paid and is an undergraduate majoring in engineering or related or allied field is eligible. This includes all students who graduate during the current fiscal year. Previous regional winners of the Technical Presentation Competition are not eligible.
(3) Guidelines for Entries to the Technical Presentation Competition
The Technical Paper should be a report describing original research with an application in engineering. This can be either laboratory work or a computer simulation or modelling project, but it is important that it is new work, unique to you, and is not a review article in which you summarize that work of others. You can write about a project you are working on alone, as an independent study project, or one you are working on with others. Some schools have courses that involve group projects as part of their class assignments. These are perfectly acceptable to write about, as long as they involve original work. You may also write about a project you worked on during a summer job or co-op assignment.
Your paper must show that you understand background material relevant to the topic, and should include an explanation of what you are doing and why, a presentation of results, a discussion of these results, and some brief recommendations for what should be done next. In other words, it should be constructed as a paper for publication in a technical journal (in fact, the winning papers are usually published). It would be useful for you to look through some journals to get a good idea of what is included in papers, and what writing style is used. The following describes the sections that are found in a typical research paper, although what they are called and how they are organized can vary somewhat from one journal to another. You should include these sections in your report, keeping in mind that what you put in each section will depend on what it is you are writing about and thus may not exactly fit the explanation given below. If you have any questions, please ask your Regional Coordinator for clarification.
The writing style for papers for publication is typically rather formal. Usually the past tense, passive voice is used (e.g. "The experiment was performed at room temperature" rather than "We always just did our experiments in the lab.") You can assume that the readers of your paper are scientists and engineers who have a sound knowledge of general principles in the basic sciences and engineering, but they may not be familiar with terminology specific to a particular field.
[Guidelines developed by Dr. Miriam Maslanik, University of Colorado at Boulder and Dr. Bonnie Glatz, Iowa State University.]
(4) Judging
Regional finalists will be selected on the basis of the written entries by panels of engineers of different backgrounds. ONE finalist will be selected from the eligible entries of each region. Judging criteria include the paper's appearance, organization, problem definition, development of alternative solutions, presentations of research, experimentation or modeling, and conclusions.
All finalists will compete in an oral competition at the National Student Conference. Each speaker is allotted 15 minutes. Five minutes of questions from the judges are permitted. Speakers will be evaluated on the bases of their verbal presentations (poise, voice, posture, visual aids, appearance, organization, etc.), as will as the technical content of the presentation. Judging criteria will be distributed to the speakers prior to the Conference. The judging panel usually consists of about four judges from various engineering disciplines and includes at least one national SWE officer.
(6) Awards
The regional finalists will receive information about the transportation allocation (up to tourist class airfare) from SWE Headquarters. In return for accepting the transportation costs, the entrant agrees to participate in the practice session and oral competition at the Nation Student Conference.
All winners will be honored at the Student Awards Banquet. Although the prizes may vary, the national winners typically receive cash awards of $1500 for first place, $1000 for second place, and $750 for third place.