A couple of years ago, as I was finishing my graduate studies, I was lucky enough to participate in the Strong Bar competition put on by the ASM Heat Treat Society at the Heat Treat Show 2021. This competition challenges university students to design and execute a heat treatment of their choice on a provided steel bar, which then will be tested in bending at the heat treat conference that year. The group with the highest combined load and deflection is deemed the winner. This competition opened the possibility for my teammate and me to work in the university’s materials lab which was otherwise closed off to non-PhD students. We were able to perform metallurgical analysis such as sectioning, polishing, performing the micro-hardness traverse, and even etching the sample to see the microstructure. As a budding mechanical engineer looking to pursue a career in a materials-dominated industry, this was an invaluable experience. Our team weighed the available options for heat treatment on the bar and assumed our fellow competitors would be going for quench and temper processes to ensure their bars would be able to handle the bending load. Wanting a more novel heat treatment, our team decided on carburization to take advantage of the higher strength from adding carbon to the steel, as well as leveraging the residual surface compressive stress induced by the process. Unfortunately, this led to a more brittle microstructure and our bar failed spectacularly in the three-point bend machine on the conference floor. Regardless, much was learned, and it was a great experience overall.