How did you become involved with UIL?
I worked with the guy who was the director of the contest before me. We were really good friends at the University of Texas at Austin.
Were you aware of UIL before you became involved with it?I actually did UIL in high school.
I don’t know if I ever competed in Slide Rule [the Calculator Applications contest’s predecessor]. I did all the band, music, Solo & Ensemble, that stuff.
What do you do in your spare time?
I still enjoy music. I play bass guitar in a church band on a weekly basis. Other than that, I’ve done a whole series of Habitat for Humanity- style projects. I’ll typically do two to three weeks a year of service project-type stuff.
What skills do students take away from this contest that are important?
The main one would be reasoning skills. Certainly that, and problem solving.
Where do the questions from the test come from?
We just think them up. These days, I do them all by myself. It’s just part of a creative process. Sometimes, there’s research involved, and the questions — the geometry and the stated problems — have some guidelines on what types of questions I put together. Other than that, it’s just sitting and thinking up interesting problems and casting them into a form a contestant can work with.
How long does it take you to make the basic test?
It’s really hard to say because we’ve always written the tests at the same time. I do nine tests a year, and I write them altogether, rather than just doing A, then B, then C. There’s sort of a long-standing tradition going all the way back to the beginning to write them during the summer. For example, for this year I started writing them in the middle of June and had them pretty much ready to go by the end of September.
Is there a different procedure for the State Meet test?
As a matter of fact, one of the features of the contest is that Test A and Test I are very interchangeable. Any of the tests can be switched around, from the invitational to district, regional; the level of difficulty on all those tests, from test-to-test, is very uniform.
Do you frequently interact with any of the competitors?
It’s really more of the coaches. The only students I see are at the State Meet, and they’re typically more interested in doing their test routine, getting the tests back and interacting with their peers. But the coaches, I see from year-to-year and run into at the Student Activities Conferences.
Do you come across former contestants at UT?
We run across them. In Mechanical Engineering we have a mentoring procedure where freshmen are randomly assigned to faculty, and we talk about early non-academic issues. One of my mentees is actually a state competitor in Calculator; that’s the most recent case. For the State Meet, I rely on students at the university who have competed to help with the administration of the contest.