Back from Kingston. The last month has been school-like, with UTEK preparations and then OEC preparations. I had no expectations of making it to OEC, let alone winning UTEK, but the weekend competition was fun, free, and an overall great experience. We probably came no where close to the top three and UofT had a pretty poor showing, with only one 2nd place finish among the six categories. I think the poor showing is partly a result of poor organization of UTEK. From a competitors standpoint, it was one of the worst organized events I've ever witnessed. The actual competition day went okay, but the lead up to it was awful. The biggest thing we learned at OEC was to succeed in Entrepreneurial Design or Corporate Design, you really need to present a long term project that you have been working on for school or on your own. All other teams had these elaborate displays with projects that must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many were sponsored by companies because it was a school project in conjunction with that company.

But some positites to take away from this:
1) In our category - Entrepreneurial Design - only UofT entrants (2 of 8 teams) had projects which were not electrical or computer based. This really shows the creativity and diversity of talent we have at the UofT.
2) We can learn from the organizational mistakes of UTEK to improve UTEK next year.
3) Now that we've been to OEC, we know the expectations and the competition we face. We can now better prepare UofT competitors for next year. UofT only started UTEK last year and so we never sent a competitive contigent to OEC until last year - where we apparently blew the competition away - even though this was the 25th annual OEC.