Vanderbilt Engineering students turn a Sarratt Student Center landing into something of a modern-day Kitty Hawk as they prepare and launch vehicles containing particularly fragile cargo. Rules demanded that each egg-carrying contraption be built of FedEx boxes and $5 or less of additional materials.

One hundred or so people gathered Dec. 1 under the balcony of the Overcup Oak Restaurant in Sarratt Student Center to witness the annual engineering egg-drop competition. In this perennially popular event, engineering students use FedEx boxes plus everyday materials that can't cost more than $5 to construct a container that can keep an egg from breaking when dropped from a considerable height. Last year, the competition attracted about 35 contestants, and the drop point was a second-story stairwell on Jacobs Hall. The number of successful drops about equaled the number that whacked into the ground with enough force to crack their delicate payload.
       This year, the number of entries competing for the $200 first prize mushroomed to 50. Even though this year's drop site was a story higher than last year's, only two packages ended up with broken eggs, and one was an illegitimate entry constructed from a Postal Service mailer. (The event is sponsored by FedEx, so students must make their egg delivery systems out of official FedEx boxes and design them so the FedEx logo can be clearly seen.)
       "The students seem to have learned a lot this year," said one veteran egg-drop observer. Other onlookers complained that the lack of egg smashes took away much of the drama. Engineering Dean Kenneth Galloway voiced a popular sentiment when he remarked, "Next year we have to find someplace even higher." The crowd had a number of suggestions for new venues, including the Kirkland Hall tower, the new parking garage and Olin Hall.
       This year's entries exhibited considerable ingenuity. One student turned her FedEx box into a three-bladed helicopter that looked like a garish update of a Leonardo da Vinci design. Another was inspired by a dinner of Jell-O and potato chips to stick his egg in a Jell-O-filled Pringles container and tape it in the FedEx carton. Another used four wooden sticks to create an open-sided cube with the egg suspended in a stretchy nylon sling. Several used parachutes to reduce their containers' impact. Yet another was made by wrapping the egg in a sock, putting it inside the carton and then placing the carton within a large, inflated plastic sack. One of the softest landings was achieved by an entry buoyed by 12 helium-filled balloons, but it was disqualified because its cost exceeded the $5 limit.
       The lack of egg casualties also made the judging particularly difficult. According to the rules, the lightest entry that kept its egg intact is the winner. After comparing the weights of the 49 successful entries, contest organizer Joy Nystrom, a senior in biomedical engineering, announced the winners: the $200 first prize went to Ryan Josefovsky, Jason Buck took the second award of $150 and there was a three-way tie for the $100 third prize: Peter Kashou, Bear Sunderland and the team of Mir Hidayat and Yashir Afdhal.