I am really active with IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). It started my sophomore year at Texas Tech when I joined my student branch. It was not long before I left my sorority because I wanted to spend more time in the electrical department. I then moved to the east coast after college and started to get involve with more of the organization. I have various roles but the one I am the most passionate about is being the student activities chair for the southeast region of the US. I love working with students but one thing under my responsibility is the regions traveling hardware trophy. It’s a tradition started in 1981 but the trophy ran out of space in 2016. Here is the revamp I did with my handy GF.
This is what I was working with at the start:
^^^ FYI, Before I entered into the role, students were taking the oldest plates and just putting them in a plastic bag tapped to the trophy. These plates have a lot of meaning to the students (they are engraved by the branch that won that year) and so putting old plates in a bag was not going to work for me.
The first issue in the revamp was how to make room for new plates without erasing the history of the old plates. No matter how plates are rearranged on the wood board, there was not much room left. Therefore, we had to get creative. I decided to move all information on the winners onto a new plate that can serve as the header plate. I also got a new wooden board:
I used anodized aluminum. the vendor for this plate was https://www.onlinemetals.com
Now I need to figure out what to do for the plates on the new board for future hardware competition winners. I tried out a few different ones:
I did end up going with anodized aluminum black plates. The reason for anodized as opposed to laser plates was that I found anodized ones that are double sided (which would make sense 
) The reason for the double side was so that I can put future plates on the trophy that can get flipped.
The first new plate has already been flipped by Clemson.
Now what about all the old hardware? Well I was not going to throw that away. I decided to make mini trophies of the old material and each plaque was sent back to the schools:
In the end, this was a long project but well worth it. I cant wait for the new trophy to get handed out at this years competition in April.
All settings used were full power and full speed.