Global Undergraduate Student Video Competition

By Stas' Gawel

After two years of hard work and dedication from our team of YP’s, we are proud to officially announce the first annual Global Undergraduate Student Video Competition.  For those of you who did not have a chance to watch the video available on our website, the competition involves creating a short YouTube video covering the specified topic or one of its subtopics in such a way that an average high school student can understand.

This year’s topic is “How an Oil Refinery Works” and its subtopics are “Separation”, “Conversion”, and “Purification.” A panel of judges involved with the oil and gas industry will judge each video on its technical merits. The videos will also be judged based on its creativity and presentation quality with special consideration given to teams that incorporate safety. The videos with the highest score in each category as well as the videos with the most likes on YouTube will be awarded prizes at the 2015 Annual Student Conference.

The goal of the Global Undergraduate Student Video Competition is to provide the opportunity for students to participate in a competition without having to travel to a conference. This competition stands in contrast to the Chem-E-Car Competition. While the Chem-E-Car Competition is exciting and challenging, there is one large downside: in order to compete, each team must first travel to the regional conference, and if they do well, they must travel again to the annual competition. This cost of travel can be a barrier even for student chapters based in the United States let alone student chapters located halfway around the world. By having a video competition, students no longer need to worry about raising enough money to travel to all the conferences and can instead focus on the competition at hand.

Another goal of the competition is to provide clear examples of what Chemical Engineers can do. As many of you may know, it is often hard to put into words exactly what a Chemical Engineer does. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that the other engineering disciplines build more tangible things; civil engineers build bridges, mechanical engineers build engines, electrical engineers build circuits. Chemical engineers, on the other hand, work in a wide variety of fields and positions due to their versatility. By having a new topic every year, we can take the best videos and use them as an education tool to recruit the next generation of chemical engineers.

If you would like to learn more about the competition, I encourage you to visit the webpage at: http://www.aiche.org/community/awards/global-undergraduate-student-video-competition (You can also search Google for AIChE Global Undergraduate Student Video Competition). Be on the lookout for completed videos in the beginning of June, and be sure to like and share your favorites