Reestablished student club earns second place in regional competition
UB's reestablished Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) club earned second place at its first regional competition.
By Peter Murphy
Published June 9, 2022
The new UB Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) student chapter won second place in the 2022 ITE Collegiate Traffic Bowl Northeastern District competition.
“With the recent increase in the sustainable transportation and logistics program enrollment, and expanded interest in transportation studies, we decided to relaunch the UB ITE student chapter,” says UB ITE advisor and assistant professor in civil, structural and environmental engineering Irina Benedyk.
In April 2022, Benedyk worked with students in the Stephen Still Institute of Transportation and Logistics’ (ISTL) sustainable transportation and logistics MS program to reestablish the student chapter that had been dormant for several years. One month later, the club came in second place out of a group that includes student chapters from eight Northeastern states.
The competition follows a quiz show format where students are presented with clues and questions “associated with subject areas like transportation engineering and planning, general transportation knowledge, rules of the road, current events in surface transportation, popular cultures topics (such as movies, music, sports, etc.) and general knowledge that are related to transportation planning and engineering,” according to ITE.
The team participating in the Traffic Bowl was chapter president and sustainable transportation and logistics students Afif Farabi (president), Ryan Egan (treasurer), transportation engineering PhD students Jiajun Pang (vice president) and Kaiser Mahmood (secretary) and Dante Bucci and Mustafa Shakoor.
UB ITE plans to participate in next year’s Northeastern Traffic Bowl, and the chapter is looking to expand its membership heading into the 2022-2023 academic year. Specifically, the club has openings for a communication officer and social coordinator. Interested students may join the chapter’s Discord Server.