IME students Ryan Kohls and Joshua Grassel received a second place CSU Research Competition Award for their presentation, “Production Planning in Integrated Circuit Supply Chains.”
The CSU Student Research Competition is held each spring to promote excellence in undergraduate and graduate scholarly research and creative activity by recognizing outstanding student accomplishments across the 23 CSU campuses.
This year the competition moved to a virtual format due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“We would like to thank the CSU East Bay and Cal Poly student research teams for making such a smooth transition to a virtual platform for the competition,” Grassel said. “We had a great time presenting our research exposing ourselves to many new and interesting ideas from our fellow students. We would also like to thank Dr. Awwad for encouraging us to turn our class project into a full-fledged research topic.”
The team said the most valuable lesson they learned was the importance of adapting their message to communicate their ideas to a wider audience.
“Research requires deep focus in a specialized field, while presenting those ideas requires synthesizing that information into a clear message that anyone can understand. Our research was used in a class presentation, a paper submitted to the IISE 2020 annual conference, and finally a paper and presentation for the CSU student research competition. We adjusted our presentation for each of these audiences, as each group had something different to gain from our work. This competition taught us that being able to communicate our findings is just as important as the research itself,” Grassel said.
Each year, over 200 students from the 23 CSU campuses submit written papers and make oral presentations before juries of professional experts from major corporations, foundations, public agencies and universities in California. Cash prizes are awarded.
This year’s virtual research competition occurred on Friday, April 24, 2020. Ten students were selected to represent Cal Poly following an internal competition in February 2020.
To view the Cal Poly represented presentations visit here.
