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VECTOR ANALYSIS: Tau Beta Pi members
plot football strategy.
Courtesy Terence Chia
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on november 22, Trent Edwards and Kai Yu
will take to the field at Stanford and face off against
their rivals from Cal. Both men hope to bring home the coveted
Axe.
But the similarities end there. Edwards, ’06, Stanford’s
quarterback, will be in a stadium packed with thousands
of the Cardinal faithful for Big Game. Yu, ’04, a
member of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi, will
play
touch football on a dormitory field against the society’s
Berkeley chapter in the “Little Big Game.”
The
match is “partially to break stereotypes,” says
Tau Beta Pi president Christine Santos, ’04. “Engineers
aren’t just stuck in the lab all day.”
Truth be
told, though, it’s far from a hard-core sporting
event. The 2002 game started about an hour late, leaving
little time to play before the real Big Game began.
Crowds of alumni
poured onto the field Tau Beta Pi members were expecting
to use, so they ended up on a nearby plot of grass
that wasn’t
exactly a level playing field. “Half of the time
we were playing uphill,” Yu remembers.
Some years,
the Cardinal has had to borrow players from the Bears
to field a full team. Stanford lost last
year,
28-21.
Of course, the football game isn’t the real
lure of joining Tau Beta Pi. Seniors in the top 20
percent of their class are
eligible. A smaller coterie of juniors are offered
membership as well. Candidates become members by participating
in panel
discussions, tutoring and social gatherings. Many join
to network with people outside their own department. “I
wanted the opportunity to meet some of the brightest
people from other
majors,” says Yu, an electrical engineering major.
That’s
most of the point behind the Little Big Game, too—to
meet fellow engineers. For now, the mini Axe remains
at Cal, in the chapter office. “There won’t
be some sort of thieving attempt on it, will there?” asks
Berkeley’s chapter president, Brian Love. It seems
that when it comes to the Big—or Little Big—Game,
some things never change.
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