Nov. 9, 2006 :: No. 72

A 19-year-old sophomore made the final points in the last 20 seconds to pull the Cal State Fullerton team ahead of the Stanford team to place in the top five schools in the multistate tournament held Nov. 4 and 5.

“I couldn’t help it,” said the smiling Bryan Moore, a computer engineering major. “When I gave the answer to ‘What is the inverse function of X3-5?’ I just had to stand up and raise my hands over my head in victory.” It should be noted that Moore, an ex-basketball player, is at least 6-foot-6 and at least 250 pounds, making for an impressive victory salute.

Teams in the competition are given 20 seconds to come up with the correct answer to a question. Moore’s correct answer to the final question meant that the CSUF chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) placed in the top five in the first competition it had entered. The CSUF team came in fourth in the NSBE’s Academic Tech Bowl contest, after USC in first place, another team from Stanford in second place, and the University of Arizona in third place. Fullerton’s vault from out-of-the-running to fourth place in the final seconds bumped Stanford’s second team to fifth place.

Dozens of teams competed in the Tech Bowl at the Fairmont Hotel in Newport Beach during the NSBE’s Far Regional Conference. The conference includes all of Region 6, which encompasses all states east of Texas, including Alaska and Hawaii. Region 6 has about 3,000 members.

Making the four-person Fullerton team’s win even more impressive is that there was only one senior, Shiana Inniss, an electrical engineering major, and two freshmen. The freshmen were Ima Udo, also an electrical engineering major, and Clyde Hill, a computer science major.

Competition questions are based primarily on the Engineering in Training Program exam and include queries based on mathematics, C++ and other programming languages, and such questions as “What is a ‘post’ condition?”

“But they throw in some different questions, too,” said Moore, shaking his head slightly. “Things like, ‘Who was the first national president of NSBE?’”

Four years ago, the Fullerton NSBE chapter was moribund. It was down to four members. Then Miguel Martinez, a counselor in the Center for Academic Support in Engineering and Computer Science — a part of the university’s College of Engineering and Computer Science — recruited Michael Alston Jr. and a few other enthusiastic students as NSBE members and rebuilt the chapter. This year, there are 25 members, and more are expected next year. Alston is now the president, Moore the vice president and Michael E. Johnson Jr., a senior in electrical engineering, is running for NSBE Region 6 chair.

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