Inaugural E-Fest Digital Draws Nearly 1,800 Registrants

After holding a successful ASME E-Fest Asia Pacific program on-site in India earlier in the year, the coronavirus pandemic forced a change of plans for the remainder of the year’s ASME Engineering Festivals® (E-Fests). As a result, E-Fest Digital was launched — and it was a rousing success.

Nearly 1,800 total registrants — including almost 1,400 engineering students from 47 countries — signed up for the special event, which was held on April 25 as a replacement for the E-Fest North and E-Fest South that were cancelled due to the COVID-19 crisis.

The five-hour event, on the E-Fest YouTube channel, kicked off with opening remarks from ASME Executive Director/CEO Tom Costabile, followed by an overview of the E-Fest Digital schedule, flashback videos featuring highlights from past E-Fests, and recorded messages and greetings from ASME leadership, volunteers and staff members.

E-Fest Digital featured a variety of personal and professional development skill-building presentations, including a session on ASME opportunities for students and early career engineers given by Valentina Alayon, strategic projects specialist at ASME, and a presentation on how engineering careers can evolve over time, presented by Prof. Jeff Hanson of Texas Tech University, who is both chair of the ASME Student Programming Committee and a leading YouTube personality with more than 80,000 followers.

The E-Fest Digital program also included technical presentations by Doug Stainbrook of Siemens PLM; Erik Larson from Altair; and Matt Walsh of Siemens; as well as three Student Leadership Training (SLT) sessions: “Creating Your Self Brand,” with Nicole Salloum of CloudX and Maya Reslan of the National Institute of Standards and Technology; “Adapting to Change,” with Omar Kheir of EPCOM and Bilal Wasim from Sterling Engineering; and “Becoming Your Own Boss” with Brandon Graham of Arke Aeronautics.

The afternoon featured two interactive live sessions addressing issues and concerns related to the COVID-19 outbreak. The first, “Engineering Response to COVID-19,” was an illuminating discussion of ASME’s and industry’s response to the current pandemic. Panelists for this discussion included ASME Executive Director/CEO Tom Costabile; Christine Reilley, senior director of Strategy and Innovation for ASME; Bob Hauck, chief mechanical engineer (retired), GE Healthcare; and Iana Aranda, director of Engineering for Global Development at ASME. During the second live session that afternoon, “Getting Hired During the Coronavirus Pandemic,” panelists Laurie Burruss of LinkedIn Learning, Jake Hirsch-Allen from LinkedIn, and ASME’s managing director for Programs, Anand Sethupathy, addressed steps that students and engineers could take to improve their career readiness.

In lieu of the live student competitions that would have been presented at E-Fest North and E-Fest South, students competed in virtual versions at E-Fest Digital — including the Human Powered Vehicle Challenge (HPVC), the Student Design Competition, the Oral Competition, the Innovative Additive Manufacturing 3D Challenge, and the Elevator Pitch Competition.

Two HPVC competitions were held for students who had registered to compete at E-Fest North and E-Fest South. The big winners at the competition for E-Fest North registrants, which consisted of each team presenting the design report for their vehicles, were Missouri University of Science and Technology in first place, California State University, Northridge, in second, and South Dakota State University in third. The top three teams at the HPVC competition for E-Fest South registrants were Missouri University of Science & Technology in first place, South Dakota State University in second and the University of San Diego in third.

Other prize winners at the E-Fest Digital event included Milwaukee School of Engineering, which took first and second place at the Student Design Competition “Building to the Sky” paper tower-building challenge; Ankish Priet from San Jose State University and Evan Fick from South Dakota State University, who both finished first in the Oral Competition; Utah Valley University, whose team took top honors in the Innovative Additive Manufacturing 3D (IAM3D™) Challenge; and the two first-prize winners of the new Elevator Pitch Competition: Manas Vyas from the LNM Institute of Information Technology in Jaipur, India, who won in the “Additive Manufacturing” elevator pitch category, and C. Lisa from the Institute of Engineering & Management, Kolkata, India, who placed first in the “COVID-19” category. For the complete list of student competition winners at E-Fest Digital, visit https://efestdigital.asme.org/page/1518212/winners.

To view video recordings of the various E-Fest Digital presentations on the E-Fest YouTube channel, visit https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRoU6_W9twXeiwT5vi_2Srw/featured. To download the “Getting Hired During the Coronavirus Pandemic” presentation, visit https://efestdigital.asme.org/. For more information on the E-Fest program, visit https://efests.asme.org. To learn more and join the ASME FutureME LinkedIn group visit https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12118554/.