The Student Endowment Fund is happy to continue to support student attendance at the Western District Annual Meeting (WDAM) by providing 2 Regional Travel Scholarship per year. Students who are interested in attendance to WDAM next year is encouraged to apply to the scholarship by April 15th to the Student Funding Initiatives Committee Chair next year (link). All applications are reviewed and two winners are awarded $500 to support travel, lodging, and needs associated with attendance to the annual meeting. Thank you to the ITE community for your contributions that helps make this possible!

We are excited to announce our first winner – Keith Kobayashi. Please see below for a brief recap of his time at the conference.

Flying into Sacramento on Sunday, I was excited to attend my first ITE Conference. Going on a 6h flight from Hawaii to Sacramento was tiring, but despite the timezone difference, I was ready for my first conference experience. After getting picked up by my friend, we drove to the airbnb where our ITE
Student Chapter was staying. Taking a quick rest, me and all the other people from OSU went to the Kell Competition. Although I have previously met with a couple of UW students, I’ve never met so many students in ITE, which was an interesting experience. I even met someone from Hawaii that went to Cal Poly, and realized we both had a mutual friend, which was surprising. We ended up partnering together for the Kell Competition, and though we didn’t win, had a pretty fun time playing.

On Monday, I attended a couple technical sessions. My favorite speaker that day was on the Vision Zero track, where they discussed using AI to analyze traffic and create better traffic signaling. I really enjoyed their examples of AI technology through the past few years, as well as how they used AI to quickly analyze traffic patterns through a certain intersection. Later during the day, my friend and I went to the first timer social, where we met with other ITE Students. Although I was a bit nervous talking to a lot of new people, I realized that with everyone having the same interest (transportation), chatting with new people wasn’t as hard as I was expecting.

Tuesday was an exciting day. Since I was planning on competing in the Traffic Control Device Student Challenge (TCDC) later this year (which is on roadway worker safety), I attended the technical session on work zones. I think the most interesting one was on work zone intrusion technology, where the speaker demonstrated many differenttechnologies to alert workers if a car comes into the work zone. After that, me and some other people from OSU decided to attend the Street Design Technical Session, since we were interested in the Valencia bike lane presentation. I then participated in the MiteY Race with my friend. Although we were pretty confident in ourselves and our ability to find things, we got confused, and ended up in 14th place. Towards the end of the day, I attended the annual awards blanket. There, I sat at a random table and introduced myself. I learned a lot from the people there about what it’s like working as a transportation engineer, and their experiences in the field. Since my flight was mid-day on Wednesday, I wasn’t able to attend too many things. I did attend the 8:00 technical session for University Research, where I saw two students from my University present their research, which I found to be pretty neat. After their technical sessions, I returned to the Airbnb, packed up, and prepared to go home. Attending the ITE Western District Annual Meeting was a very fun and informative couple of days. I was able to meet with lots of professionals, ITE Students from other universities, as well as participate in many fun activities. Going to the conference was definitely worth it, and I am glad I was able to attend it.