Queen's wins third prize at CEC 2020

Members of the Queen's engineering team at the 2020 Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC) in Manitoba.

For the Queen’s students L-R: Joseph Grosso (Apple comp, 3rd year), Andrew Farley (comp, 3rd year), Kyle Singer (EngPhys comp, 3rd year), Andrew Fryer (comp, 2nd year). Furthest on the left and right are University of Manitoba students. (Both Photos courtesy of CEC)

A huge congratulations to the Queen's engineering team who placed third prize in the Programming category at the prestigious Canadian Engineering Competition (CEC) in early March.

Every year, over 200 students are invited to compete in eight categories. To receive invitation, the teams have to first win their school competition and achieve a top performance at a regional competition.

Queen's Engineering and Applied students in the team were:

• Andrew Farley (comp, 3rd year)
• Andrew Fryer (comp, 2nd year)
• Joseph Grosso (Apple comp, 3rd year)
• Kyle Singer (Eng Phys comp, 3rd year)

In the words of Engineering Physics student Kyle Singer:

I had a fantastic time competing at the Canadian Engineering Competition. There, my team and I were faced with a challenging problem and only 8 hours to come up with a working solution. What makes these competitions so difficult is that as Engineers, you want to be able to consider a multitude of solutions as well as each of their impacts on different stakeholders. With the strict time constraint, it is not so easy to complete such a task and be able to express it thoroughly in a presentation.

My proudest moment at the competition was when one of the judges mentioned after our presentation that they had not seen any other team have a solution that resembled ours. The thing I think that has made my team and I so successful at the Queen’s, Ontario, and Canadian competitions is not only our ability to work well together but our slightly different backgrounds in terms of Engineering disciplines. While we all come from different streams of Engineering, I believe that Queen’s has prepared us well for problem solving challenges like these competitions. From taking courses like APSC 100 and 200 all the way to ENPH 353 and 354, I am convinced that the faculty has given us the tools and confidence we need to solve real world problems.