Engineering Science Competition

Every year, the University of Auckland’s Engineering Science Competition attracts hundreds of students from across New Zealand. The format is deceptively simple: four students, one complex question, and 8 hours to find a solution. This year, Rosmini College fielded three teams, each tackling the same challenge alongside their peers in one of the country’s most demanding school-level competitions.

On the surface, it appears to be a marathon of math and coding; equations scrawled across whiteboards, graphs plotted on laptops, caffeine fueling long hours. But the real purpose of the competition goes deeper. It forces students to think beyond textbook exercises and confront the messy, open-ended problems that define the real world. There is no answer key, no shortcut, and no perfect solution; only approaches that balance creativity, logic, and practicality.

That’s what makes the competition so valuable. It mimics the conditions of engineering itself. In the workplace, engineers rarely face neat, isolated tasks. Instead, they are asked to model unpredictable systems: transport networks, energy grids, disease outbreaks, and climate change. The 8-hour challenge captures this reality, demanding not just technical skill but also teamwork, time management, and the ability to adapt when initial ideas fail.

For Rosmini’s teams, this meant more than solving equations. It meant dividing roles: one student coding a simulation, another refining mathematical models, a third checking assumptions, a fourth preparing the final report. It meant arguing through disagreements, making judgment calls with limited time, and deciding when “good enough” was better than perfect. At 4 pm, 6 hours in, it meant resilience; the discipline to keep going when focus wavered and the problem felt unsolvable.

And that’s the lesson students take with them. The competition isn’t designed to produce perfect answers; it’s designed to produce better problem-solvers. Students who emerge from it carry a clearer sense of what real engineering looks like: working with incomplete data, balancing competing priorities, and knowing that collaboration is often more important than individual brilliance.

This year, Rosmini didn’t walk away as the headline winners. But success here isn’t measured only in rankings. It’s measured in the quiet confidence built over those 8 hours: the knowledge that a group of high school students can tackle problems normally reserved for university classrooms. It’s measured in the realisation that maths and science aren’t just abstract subjects; they are tools that can model and even change the world.

By entering three teams, Rosmini gave more students access to that experience. Some discovered leadership in unexpected moments. Others found the patience to keep trying when their code wouldn’t run. All walked away with the shared memory of an event that was as exhausting as it was rewarding; an event that pushed them out of the familiar comfort of school learning into something closer to the realities of engineering and science.

The Engineering Science Competition is tough, relentless, and often humbling. But that is exactly why it matters. It shows that Rosmini students are not afraid to take on challenges bigger than themselves, and that the skills they are building in classrooms today will one day help solve the problems shaping tomorrow.

Article by Jairus Joseph and Maximillian Wong