Nerds of ‘90s: an Old Breed : Contest: Annual spoof demonstrates that UCI’s engineering students are unchanging with the times.

The question is not whether UC Irvine engineering students are nerds. The question is: Just what is a nerd?

The emcee at the annual campus Nerd Contest on Wednesday warned the audience that the examples they would see were “slightly exaggerated.” And all the current schools of thought were plainly represented in the self-parodies performed by engineering students.

There was the playpen school of nerds, represented by two students who squirted sunscreen lotion and pancake batter at the audience and spoke like someone emerging from crash-helmet tests.

There was the techno-nerd, represented by a student who could tune in the universe with his Walkman--”the nerd of the ‘80s, the ‘90s and the zero-zeroes.”

There was the hayseed nerd in red-plaid suit and cowlick, aw-shucks-ing his way through sentences; the classic nerd with his shirt tail peeking through his fly and his glasses taped in three places; and the femi-nerds--women who live for Monday so they can resume studying.

But the nerds who won this first title of the ‘90s were the rocker nerds, Elvis Presleywitz and his band singing “Born to Be Mild”:

I’m anally retentive.

I’m off to Engineering,

Looking for some women

Or whatever comes my way.

Elvis, with a toilet-seat cover caught in his pants and a roll of toilet paper hanging from a belt loop, was sophomore Kevin Trout, backed by guitarists David Kuo and Dennis Lin, both seniors, and groupie-in-drag Kelvin Javier, a junior. All are engineering students from Cerritos and old high-school buddies.

“We just did it for the money,” said Lin. (Actually, for a compact disc player, the first prize.)

People think engineering students are nerds because they’re so reclusive, Kuo explained. “We spend hours and hours just building things.”

The image of the awkward, socially inept nerd is, in fact, a cherished part of the engineering mystique, he said. “We should keep it intact. It’s been around for years.”

But “when we do come out of seclusion, we’re probably the rowdiest ones around,” Kuo said.

The crowd that watched the nerd contest was reasonably rowdy, but the onlookers became fascinated two hours later when the Rube Goldberg Contest got under way.

Named after the cartoonist who devised ridiculously intricate machines to do simple tasks, the contest drew entrants with the offer of a $9,000 personal computer as first prize.

The assignment was to create the most cleverly complicated machine that would crack an eggshell and extract the yolk whole.

Brian McDonell of Sherman Oaks, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, won the big prize, proving that simplicity is the key to any machine. His, simple by comparison to most others, was the only one that succeeded without a little nudge here or there.

It did so by burning through a string with a candle, thereby releasing a rat trap that had been crimping a hose, allowing a balloon to deflate (and snuffing the candle for safety), thereby lowering a boom containing a bottle of water that poured onto a paper towel supporting a length of chain, which fell onto a lever that lowered a weight into a jar of water, thus priming a siphon hose, which lowered the water level and sprung another lever which triggered the egg-o-tine, a swinging blade that sliced off the bottom of the suspended egg, brushed away any loose shell fragments and allowed the yolk to fall into a bowl.

The team of Yoram Fisher, Jack Hwang and Kirk Evans, all seniors in applied physics, created a huge apparatus that even utilized chemical reactions. It required encouragement here and there, but it eventually deposited a whole yolk into a frying pan, winning the students the team prize--$200 in cash.