Best performance ever by first year communicators

The ability to present technical ideas is an important part of becoming an engineer. An annual prize is awarded to the best student communicators.

Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng), IBM and Imperial judges agreed that the 2013 finalists gave the best collective performance since the prizes were instituted in 2006. Top prizes went to Tim Rauf-Pick, Dylan Auty, Eseroghene Emory, and Zi Shiah at the RAEng  Technical Communication Final and Prizegiving held at the end of the Spring term.  Auty and Rauf-Pick were among 12 students chosen to re-present five-minute talks they had given as part of their Professional Engineering coursework, giving them the chance to win  £100 and something good to put on their CVs.

Also receiving prizes that day were the best second-year-project teams. These groups had been working on a framework for phantom load management, low power computers for schools in developing rural communities, an integrated intelligent home system for wheelchair users, and inertial navigation-based control.  The first-place phantom load team, who were working to reduce power consumption by automatically detecting and switching off dormant devices, gave a talk about their work before being awarded £100 per team member by Rebecca Whatley-Stokes of prize sponsor Dialog Semiconductor.

Sunny Bains, Technical Communication Tutor, says that the event shows, yet again that engineers really can be good communicators. “Engineers have the advantage of starting with good analytical skills. When they take the time to learn the basics of communication and then practise, they can become very persuasive speakers and writers. This is exactly what industry says it’s looking for from our graduates.”        

The three judges, Rhys Morgan from the Royal Academy of Engineering,  Paul Bailey of IBM and Sunny Bains chose Tim Rauf-Pick’s presentation on envelope tracking system for creating video game imagery as the most polished and inspiring.