Fueled by the Fun of Engineering and Water Polo
For Tim Kerr, a fourth-year electrical engineering major and captain of the men’s water polo team at the University of California, Davis, athletics and academics form a kind of positive feedback loop, with each one boosting his confidence and energy to continue pursuing the other.
“I love playing water polo, and I love studying engineering,” he said. “Sometimes it gets hard, but it never feels like work. If I’m tired and school is kicking my butt, I go to practice, work as hard as I can, have fun, and it recharges me. Water polo gives me energy and confidence when it’s time to do my schoolwork and vice versa.”
As he enters his fourth year at UC Davis, Kerr continues to pursue both passions with the same approach: find the fun, keep going when it gets hard and stay curious about what comes next.
A Place for Both
Electrical engineering and water polo have been linked since Kerr chose to attend UC Davis. A star water polo player and swimmer at San Ramon Valley High School, Kerr knew he wanted to continue playing water polo at the highest possible level in college without giving up his goal of studying electrical engineering.
Daniel Leyson, the Child and Meisel Families Director of Men’s Water Polo, helped move the needle, telling Kerr he could do both at UC Davis.
“He said, ‘Look, it’s going to be really hard for you. You might need to make some sacrifices, but you can do engineering if you come here.’ That was a major reason why I chose UC Davis, because I wasn’t going to go to school to play water polo and not be able to study engineering,” Kerr said.
While Kerr has had to make sacrifices, he counts himself lucky. In his experience, the College of Engineering faculty has been equally supportive of his athletic goal, showing generosity and compromise when Kerr has had to miss tests or adjust his schedule.
“Every professor I’ve talked to at UC Davis is immediately like, ‘I absolutely understand. You’re going to have to make it up on the road, but that’s okay.’”
Following His Curiosity
Thanks in part to the support he receives from his coaches and professors, Kerr has maintained a 4.0 GPA and earned several accolades for academic performance as a student-athlete, including the National Collegiate Men’s Water Polo Elite Scholar-Athlete Award in 2025.
Saif Islam, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, personally reached out to Kerr to congratulate him on his performance. Kerr took the opportunity to ask Islam how he could be more involved in electrical engineering. Islam invited him to join his group as an undergraduate researcher.
Since January of 2026, Kerr has attended group meetings and helped conduct experiments in optoelectronics. Islam’s group focuses on designing new photonic and nanotechnologies that can be fabricated using the industry-standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, or CMOS, microfabrication process. Kerr specifically supported the group’s investigation into developing a CMOS-compatible, light-based “fingerprint” to secure hardware from next-generation quantum hacks.
For Kerr, who describes his young self as a tinkerer who would take apart fans, remote-controlled cars and toy robots to see how they worked, the lab adds another dimension to the education he has received through his coursework.
“I get to learn so much just from sitting in on conversations and discussing design choices,” Kerr said. “There’s so much you can learn from the lab and the research setting that wouldn’t necessarily pop up in the classroom.”
The Work of Getting Better
As a two-year team captain of a top NCAA Division 1 water polo team, Kerr has learned that leadership is less about “hoorah speeches” and grand moments and more about the day-to-day work of building teammates’ confidence and helping them succeed.
“I heard this the other day, and I liked it: Being a leader is like being a gardener. Everybody on your team is a plant in your garden, and you have to make sure that you take care of them and water them and they’re getting what they need in order to flower for the garden in the best way possible,” he said.
Kerr feels confident in the team, which currently ranks No. 6 in the country and has opened the season with seven wins. His charge is to help his team meet their goals: win the West Coast Conference, get into the NCAA tournament and advance to the semifinals.
For Kerr, the perseverance required to meet challenges in the pool carries over into engineering, where struggling with something new is often part of learning it.
“When you play a sport, you're going to mess up a lot, and you need to be able to learn the next thing, make the next play. It's just like that when I'm trying to learn something new. There's a little bit of skull sweat involved, and right where you feel a little uncomfortable, just like in sport, that's where you have to push just a little bit harder. That’s when you'll make the growth that you want.”
Kerr will follow his passions for electrical engineering and water polo for as long as they are both fun. (Mario Rodriguez/UC Davis and courtesy of UC Davis Athletics)
Making the Next Play
Kerr plans to graduate this spring and pursue a master's degree in electrical engineering. However, a new NCAA policy giving him another year of eligibility has left open the possibility of another collegiate water polo season. Next summer, he'll also travel to Lima, Peru, to compete in the 2027 Pan American Games with the Puerto Rican national team, on which he has been playing for the past couple of years.
“Being able to represent my family has been super important to me,” said Kerr, whose mother is Puerto Rican.
Whatever comes next, Kerr plans to approach it much as he has engineering and water polo: keep learning, follow what interests him and enjoy the process.
“Whenever I ask people what they think I should do next, they always say, ‘I don’t know. I just did what interested me, and it turned out great.’ I feel like, if it worked out for them, I guess I’ll do that, too. I just want to keep learning and following my curiosity and see where it’ll lead me.”
