Ignition '09

Well,it was sympo time today.The day went off quite unexpected as there were loads of surprises at store.

First thing,our college symposium hardly attracts participants from other colleges.Even last year there were around 20-30 for the symposium.So this time too we expected only 50 to turn up.But guess what-the total turnout was 380+.Now believe the kind of hard work we guys had to put up for such a challenge(if that's the name to be given).

Secondly I was one of the organisers for the event "Mechathlon".The thing is we just prepared the question paper for the finals yesterday and planned out the entire thing.The unexpected thing is that here too we expected hardly 20-25 to turn up.So didn't give much thought into conducting any sort of prelims.Plus 2 other guys had taken the onus of preparing the questions.But today morning I find them nowhere.

Time : 9 am only 2 hrs remain for the prelims and no paper set yet!Entered the CADD lab hoping to print out the questions.But where are the questions?!? So off i went googling "mechanical quiz questions" and voila,the very first site that pops up got all the questions.

9.30 am By now we selected the questions and finished editing the prelims paper.Now it was just a matter of time by which we managed to take printouts n xerox. Came to know that more than 43 teams registered for Mechathlon(each team has 3 members).So realised that we had a big task at hand.I prepared few tie breaker questions too just in case!!!

11 am Prelims under way.You should have seen how much I was sweating it out!!!running here n there.Seeing that all the things were in order.

After this 5 teams got selected and each of these teams were assigned a volunteer each to accompany them in their journey to being the ultimate mechanical champion!I was in charge of one of the teams.Now here's the format of the event:

The contestants are given different tasks in different labs and they gotta finish them up all within 90 minutes.Tasks involved were maching a cylindrical workpiece,carpentry,sheet metal and tasks in SOM,DOM n thermal labs.

Time: 1.50 pm The event gets over and so does the lunch in the canteen.Survived on few biscuits and an ice cream!!!

In the meantime we gotta see some of the coolest cars on display like Mercedes SLK 500,SLR 350 which were both convertibles.Hope to own them some day(by legal means)!!!

Had a great day today.Only thing we all cribbed was that we got very less sponsorship with the college giving us nothing but peanuts.Still quite happy that we put up a great show!!!