Ashley Forkey, S.M.ASCE, is a senior from South Florida studying civil engineering at Tufts University. She is focused on geotechnical engineering and is also pursuing a minor in engineering management. She has gained research and internship experience in geotechnical engineering along with experience in structural engineering and computer-aided design.
Forkey has been involved in ASCE throughout her undergraduate years. She is passionate about using engineering to support resilient communities and bridging the gap between student experience and professional practice.
In her column, An Undergraduate's View, Forkey documents her experience as an ASCE student member navigating her civil engineering studies.
You might be wondering how it's possible for a Tuesday night ASCE meeting to be overflowing with attendees in the middle of midterm season.
Well, what’s one thing that people wouldn't be able to resist coming to? Jeopardy!
If you aren't exhausted from studying for your 18+ credits of grueling engineering courses already, you will be once you enter a competition full of civil and environmental engineers battling for a small Lego set.
If you think the Lego set is underwhelming and not worth the stress, you’re probably correct. You also wouldn't be a civil engineering student at Tufts.
Ethan, one of the co-treasurers for our ASCE student chapter at Tufts, created the event. He designed extremely specific rebus puzzles, searched through three and a half years’ worth of courses, and tried repeatedly to remember the name of our professor's dog, which was a 500-point question. He was definitely not stressed about making this an entertaining event, and he definitely did not put many hours into the game that should have been allocated to his Structural Health Monitoring homework.
We provided four chicken parm pizzas because Ethan likes them. And that was it.
Lucca, our ASCE chapter president, and I could have objected to the gluttony that is ordering four chicken parm pizzas weeks in advance out of excitement. Since it is also our favorite pizza, we did not.
Several challenges were faced in the making of Jeopardy! The audience for this event was any civil engineering student at Tufts who might want to spend their Tuesday night participating in this. Unsurprisingly, a lot of students were busy studying for exams or had other, more pressing obligations and could not attend.
Ella, the social media manager, designed an amazing flyer, and we had a great turnout despite these challenges. The result was five teams of three to four students from different majors and grade levels – a good turnout for our small department. After a delayed start – Ethan was eating the chicken parm pizza – the competition began.
To accommodate different students' academic experience, Jeopardy! was designed in this format: 100s-level questions could be answered by all students; 200s an underclassman might be able to answer; 300-400s level questions only applied to upperclassman; and 500s, an upperclassman – specifically Lucca and I – might not even know. These questions were so specific that even Ethan didn't know which of them would cause him to pause Jeopardy, disconnect his computer from the projector, and research his own question.
I think the structure of the problems made the underclassmen feel included. I would be curious to see how they would feel if they knew that Jeopardy! was designed for them only to score if they chose the questions with the least number of points.
I also think that the winning team of all seniors would have a very different opinion on the situation and would prefer this structure.
Regardless, the column that applied to all grade levels alike was the rebus puzzles.
A rebus puzzle is a puzzle in which words are represented by combinations of pictures or individual letters; for instance, apex might be represented by a picture of an ape followed by a letter X.
When I was first told about this column, I did not know what a rebus puzzle was. This, however, was my favorite part of Jeopardy!
If you were unlucky enough to have a name that sounded like a part of one of our professor's names, a random photo of you from Instagram was chosen to attach to the rebus puzzles. My name sounds nothing like any of our professors', so I was safe, and it ended up being my favorite part of this event despite rebus puzzles not being my strong suit.
In the end, Jeopardy! was exactly what you would expect from a Tufts ASCE event: a perfect mix of chaos, competition, and chicken parm. Between very specific rebus puzzles, impossible 500-point questions for freshmen and sophomores, and an underwhelming Lego set that everyone somehow needed to win, it is safe to say that Jeopardy! was a success. If you missed it, don't worry. There is always next time.
