Engineers Teach You Life Hacks

Every year, the Engineering Student Council hosts an entire week of fun games, free food, and puppies to entice Berkeley students and the surrounding area to consider engineering as a career path.  But they’re up against this campus-wide culture that says engineering is hard and intimidating.  

Role: Creative Campaign Strategy, Storyboarding, and Ideation

The Ask: How can we make the engineering department feel less intimidating?

Constraints:

1. Be consistent with the team of EWeek 2016: “Engineering the Impossible” meaning engineering can be used across disciplines and industries to solve any problem.
2. Make it budget friendly. The Council blew their budget on the last minute addition of llamas.

The Tension: Campus culture puts the engineering department on a pedestal as the most difficult area of study.

Everybody's reverent, intimidated, and scared of engineering. As part of the department with the lowest acceptance and completion rates, the engineering students were dubbed “the master race”.

The Strategy: Demonstrate that engineering is just a way to solve problems, big or small, through comedy.

Sure, engineers tackle intimidating problems like launching rockets and building medical devices, but, at the core of it, they’re human and so are their problems.

We decided to use Facebook as the main channel. It had the highest conversion rates, is highly accessible to the entire student body and non-students, and can lead viewers directly to the event page and other relevant content.

We teamed up with Giant, a student film organization, to create this budget-friendly video series. Here’s the storyboard I used to pitch my idea: