Annual Egg Drop is a smash for CU Boulder’s Engineering Days

The crowd held its breath as another egg dropped from the eighth story window in its specially engineered casing. It plummeted to the ground with a sudden, violent splat.

The Egg Drop, a fixture of CU’s Engineering Days, took place Friday outside of the Engineering Center. It gave passersby a fun sight and contestants a chance to compete on design and crowd approval.

Participants drop their vessel from the eighth floor of the engineering office tower as they compete in the Egg Drop event of Engineering Days on Friday. (Matt Sisneros/CU Independent)

“The whole point of E-Days is to get people interested in engineering,” said senior electrical and computer engineering major Daniel Donahue, 21.

Donahue, the regent of co-ed engineering fraternity Theta Tau, said the spectacle was meant to raise awareness for student organizations.

Usually the event occurs during the spring semester to provide a break from classes and relieve stress of upcoming finals. But this year, the Engineering Council decided to schedule a fall festival to attract more people for a similar event next semester.

Senior mechanical engineering major Danim Jeong, 24, organized the Egg Drop with other members of Theta Tau. Jeong inspected all the vessels after their landing, retrieved each eggshell and assessed the damage.

“It can be difficult for students to get motivated to take what they learn in class and use it creatively,” she said. “Engineering days was a good opportunity to change that.”

Jeong said most competitors came from the aerospace department, with mechanical engineers a close second. The event is open to all majors, but each group treats it differently. Business majors, for example, tend to make very attractive devices that turn out not be so safe for the egg, she said.

One by one, each team’s device fell from the high perch. The few heavy pumpkin-like devices didn’t fare as well as the parachute and balloon contraptions, but generated more of a reaction from the audience. The drops with anvil-like crashes and safe eggs generated the most cheers.

The winners of the event were three engineering majors, Kira Sadighi, 20, Lewis Gillis, 20, and Mark Teeter, 19. The trio accepted the award for first in “Crowd Pleasing” and “Best Piece of Engineering Principles.”

Danim Jeong, a senior engineering major, holds up an unbroken egg at the Egg Drop event of the Engineering Days on Friday. Jeong, 24, helped organize the event and inspected all the vessels and their eggs after the drop. (Matt Sisneros/CU Independent)

“We looked on the internet for a bunch of different designs, and then we went to Home Depot. We got the wooden crossbars, we got the main mast and we spent probably eight hours in all building this.” Sadighi said.

The team designed an arrow-like device to propel the egg safely down.

The event was a smashing success, according to freshman engineering major Brandon Antoniak, 18. Antoniak attended the Egg Drop to see what teams were building this year to give him ideas to compete next year.

“I’m not interested in getting the biggest splat,” Antoniak said. “I’d work on saving the egg because as an aerospace engineer, I want the astronauts to come back and survive.”

Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Gabriel Larsen-Santos at Gabriel.larsen@colorado.edu.