ryochiji's blog

CSU Research Competition
Last Thursday and Friday, I went to the 17th California State University Student Research Competition, which was held at CSU Stanislaus in Turlock, CA. The 200 or so undergraduate and graduate students participating in the system-wide competition were chosen by their respective campuses, and all 23 campuses were represented at the competition (there are 402,000 students in the entire CSU system).
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Participation in the competition required a 5 page abstract along with a 10 minute oral presentation followed by a short question and answer period. The research projects were separated into 9 disciplines, and then further separated into undergraduate or graduate (for a total of 18 "sessions"). First and second places were awarded in each of the sessions.

My entry, entitled IlohaMail: A Multilingual Webmail System, was awarded 2nd place in the undergraduate "Engineering and Computer Science" session. I was actually quite surprised to have placed at all, since the other projects in my session that I saw were all very impressive. They all had topics (in engineering, at least) that seemed more impressive and/or meaningful than mine, and all of the presentations were very well done.

There are a few things that may have helped me:

None of the judges were computer scientists or software engineers. The engineering projects might have been hurt because one of the judges who obviously had a background in physics or engineering asked some pointed questions.
I had initiated my project on my own, outside of class without the help of my professors or advisors.
I had been working on the project much longer (3 years) than most of the others
Since the software had been released and deployed, the merits were more obvious
My PowerPoint presentation wasn't boring...although I did talk super duper fast.

The really cool thing is, all the 1st and 2nd place winners get to have their abstracts published in a "Conference Proceedidngs", 1000 copies of which will be distributed to students, faculty, libraries, the CSU chancellor's office, the media, etc. Although I somehow doubt very many people would read it, it still seems pretty cool.

Oh, and I also get a $200 cash prize.

Ryo Chijiiwa