Engineering

Sometimes in the evening, long after her last class of the day, Patricia Medina has an uncommon urge. She wants to go back to school. "I want to come at night and just, like, make something," said Patricia, a sophomore at University High School in West Los Angeles. What could reduce an otherwise bright, engaging student to dreams of breaking and entering?

Combine a land shark with a paddle-wheel boat, spice it with servo motors and radio transceivers, mix with water and what have you got? At Caltech, you have the year's biggest sporting event. At Tuesday's competition, engineering students at the Pasadena campus operated hand-built robots and maneuvered them through an obstacle course that included concrete walkways, a shallow pond and a finish line atop an arching bridge.

The pickup with "Official Rocket Recovery Vehicle" on its side bounced across the rutted dry lake bed kicking up silt. Andy Tryon glanced over his shoulder at his baby cradled in back. In a few minutes, his crew would gently place the Desert Hawk on the launch pad and arm it with an igniter. Showtime, and Tryon was nervous. The rocket represented three months' labor. He needed to solve the engineering flaw that doomed the Desert Hawk's three previous launches.

If Cal Poly San Luis Obispo had wanted to start an engineering program for a university in someplace like Norway, the proposal probably would have sailed through without much comment either on campus or off. But the school's plan to start an engineering department in Saudi Arabia is a different story.

Enough with the dillydallying. It's time to get the lead out. That seemed to be the rallying cry Wednesday when nearly 10,000 space-age engineers gathered in Los Angeles to talk motherboards, modules and meltdowns as the computer circuit world faces its biggest challenge in its 70-year existence. The experts are attending the Printed Circuits Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

In a relatively rare occurrence, the ranks of Los Angeles' multibillion-dollar public companies grew by one this week. Aecom Technology Corp., a global engineering services and construction-management company, went public at $20 a share Wednesday. The stock gained $1.10 on Thursday and 75 cents on Friday, closing the week at $21.85 on the New York Stock Exchange and giving the company a market value of $2 billion. Aecom, based in downtown L.A.

Justin Wong, an aerospace engineering student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was schmoozing on facebook.com last fall, when he came across a sleek Boeing Co. job ad. Wong, who had just interned at the aerospace company, saw the banner on the popular social networking site as a "two-way street" -- a defense behemoth reaching out to today's youths in their virtual playground.

Vying to build the best bridge to nowhere, engineering students from across the U.S. and Canada on Saturday joined trusses to struts and abutments to beams, creating sturdy 20-foot spans as they raced against the clock in the finals of the National Student Steel Bridge Competition at Cal State Northridge.

It was time for the robotics squad from the University of Maryland to put Tortuga through its underwater paces. "We need to put a diagnostic on the board so we know the pressure at the surface," said Stepan Moskovchenko, 20. Joseph Gland, 24, questioned the way the craft was descending in the practice pool. "That's not the desired angle; that's a weird, secondary, shadowed angle," he said. "It's trying to yaw a lot," warned Joseph Lisee, 21, as he monitored readings on a laptop.

With a humdrum name and an equally eye-glazing office building, Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo is as obscure as any company can be. It even describes itself in the most ho-hum of ways, saying merely that it provides "technical analyses for space programs." But hidden from public view behind the main office tower is a sprawling campus with 15 buildings -- many of them windowless with top-security doors -- housing 4,000 of the nation's top scientists, researchers and engineers.