Student-organized design competition hopes to get Boilermakers hired

Following the trend of large, student-organized competitions designed to showcase the incredible talents of Purdue University students, the ECE Student Society will be hosting its biannual Spark Challenge this Friday in the Purdue Armory, from 3-6 p.m.

The hiring process in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math positions is rapidly evolving, and, as such, is becoming less traditional. Despite this, or even possibly due to this, student organizations at Purdue are staying ahead of the curve. In recent years, relatively new organizations on campus have managed to secure large amounts of corporate funding to finance competitions that showcase live demonstrations of the skills students acquire during their time here at Purdue. The ECE Student Society has been adapting that same format in order to show off the creativity of students in more complex engineering applications, specifically microcontroller-based design.

”The Spark Challenge is a microcontroller design showcase to get the talent and creativity of Purdue University students out in front of the industry,” said Kent Gauen, a member of the ECESS Spark Challenge committee and a sophomore in the College of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

”The Spark Challenge is a great opportunity for Purdue University students to show their skills, and also a good way for recruiters to see beyond the interview,” Nicholas Bachewicz, a junior in the College of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the co-chairs on the committee said. “We are kind of a spin-off of BoilerMake. We combine hardware to the software that people make at hackathons. We saw that opportunity, to create a hardware-based hackathon.”

Unlike a typical hackathon, the competition doesn’t have any specific time-slot for the creation of the project. Rather, it has a specific set of rules regarding what can be submitted, how much money can be spent and the clause that the project must include a microcontroller, which is a small, single-circuit computer.

And while the competition focuses on showcasing the skills of technically-inclined Boilermakers, its organizers are also using it as a recruitment tool for the University itself.

”Right now, we’re trying to promote to local high schools,” Bachewicz said. “This is a good way for them to get a visual of what they can do with a Purdue engineering degree.”

In the past, some crowd-favorite projects included a motorized Lazy Boy chair for giving tours around campus, a robot that could follow an LED light strip and a highly practical sonar box that was designed to alert the elderly wearer of any possible collision.

Like other student showcase-type competitions, the Spark Challenge has already raised money from corporate sponsors such as Microsoft, GM, Qualcomm, Nucor and Marathon. According to the organizers, the amount of sponsors and what they were willing to contribute raised rapidly over the semester, even during the final weeks counting down to the event. Companies across the nation are eager to see the projects Purdue University students can create.