This past weekend, eight students represented Calvin College at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) leadership conference at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Andrew Jo, Jeremy Ward, Okkar Myint, Shurjo Maitra, Hezkiel Nanda, Kevin Kredit, Bethany Waanders and Jared Haan attended the event. Seniors Jo, Ward and Myint are officers of Calvin College’s IEEE student chapter, along with senior Nick VanDam.

IEEE sponsors more than 1,000 conferences and gatherings across the globe each year. The organization describes itself on its website as “the world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology.”

“We’re the Calvin chapter of a larger society,” Jo said. “[IEEE] is a large worldwide organization that does a lot of inter-company technological work.” Calvin College’s student branch is one of nearly 2,000 in 80 countries involved with IEEE.

“Calvin hasn’t been [represented at IEEE’s leadership conference] for a while, and this was our first time [participating],” Jo said. This year, Calvin was “very close to the smallest school represented,” according to VanDam. “For many schools, 20 students would be a dead end. If we get 20, that’s half of the declared electrical engineers.” As it was, eight of Calvin’s electrical engineering students participated in the three-day-long conference, which featured lectures and social events for participants.

Substantial aspects of the conference include “networking between student branches,” according to Jo, and “learning about the resources you have as a student chapter [representative IEEE student group],” according to Ward. To this end, Saturday’s events included several engineering competitions between the student groups.

“The competition was more of an entertaining aspect,” Ward said. One of the competitions was the “brown bag” contest. Students were given a brown bag of electrical components and three hours to build a VU (volume unit) meter, or music visualizer. “We had no notes, no Internet, just pencil, paper, calculator — go!” Ward said. Calvin College placed second in the brown bag competition.

The college placed first in the project showcase competition, at which Nanda presented his summer research project, “Electric and Magnetic Focusing and Navigation for Intranasal Drug Delivery,” done in collaboration with junior Ayo Ayoola and former Calvin professor April Xiuhua Si. The project focused on a magnetic field’s influence on particle movement and how this can be used to administer drugs through the nasal cavity for quick access to the brain.

Calvin College students also participated in a third conference competition: “Micromouse.” Students were given three hours to write a code instructing a commercial robot to complete an electrical tape maze—the Information Age’s version of the lab rat. “We took third in that one,” Jo reported.

“The whole collaborative part of the conference was cool,” Jo said. Students had opportunities to learn with and compete against others in their field while representing their respective colleges.

The conference was “another way to get Calvin’s name out there,” VanDam said. “We felt comfortable and did well against these other major colleges.”