Student Designers Tackle Civil Engineering Challenge

Designing, pricing and scheduling a brand new subway station in a dense city setting can be troublesome for even probably the most veteran design group to sort out, not to mention a group attempting to additionally meet deadlines for his or her year-long senior capstone tasks.

“Our time administration abilities had been examined,” says Lucas Bernstein a member of a group from the College of New Hampshire, which beat groups from six different New England schools and universities competing for $120,000 in prize cash earlier this month throughout a civil engineering design competitors at Tufts College in Medford, Mass.

Bernstein was grateful for the chance to develop “real-world abilities, making use of materials realized within the classroom to a mission in my discipline of research and … to symbolize my college.”

The third annual occasion—organized by the Labor Relations Division of the Building Industries of Massachusetts, a collective for the heavy development trade whose membership is comprised of union highway and bridge builders together with laborers, working engineers and carpenters—paired the coed groups with trade coaches. Within the fall, the groups got a package deal ready by Wentworth College of Know-how professor Jim Lambrechts, prompting them to design a hypothetical plan to increase the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s Blue Line westward. 

The groups labored on their displays at the side of their assigned trade coach or coaches earlier than pitching trade judges April 12 at Tufts. 

“The entire groups did a powerful job figuring out the engineering and development challenges concerned and clearly gained significant, sensible perception into the trade,” says Rob Pine, vp of operations at Skanska USA Civil, who served as a decide. “It was rewarding to see how this expertise prepares the following era of pros—not simply technically, however in how they suppose, collaborate, and talk.”

Groups from the College of New Hampshire, Tufts, College of Connecticut, Northeastern College, College of Vermont, College of Massachusetts Lowell and Springfield Technical Group Faculty pitched the judges earlier than UNH took the first-place prize of $15,000. Tufts obtained $10,000 for second place, whereas the remaining colleges received $5,000 every.

Pine stated that whereas the competitors was shut, “UNH stood out with their sensible design and development strategy, combining cut-and-cover and conventional tunneling to develop a constructible answer for constructing an MBTA station in a dense city setting.”

The UNH squad (Bernstein, Daniel Bartus and Tyler Beresford) was coached by Fei Han, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at UNH, and employees from design agency SPS New England, who met with the scholars bi-weekly. 

“They had been in a position to hold us in line when our concepts had been unrealistic and had been an enormous assist in creating our remaining estimate,” says Bernstein, who additionally thanked Han for serving to him calculate the forces on a slurry wall, “which was fairly sophisticated given the soil profile we had been coping with. The visible I used to be in a position to make from these calculations undoubtedly set us aside from different teams and helped us win the competitors.”

Co-founder John R. Roma, 80—who runs has run his personal consultancy after retiring from a deep basis development profession with companies resembling Skanska and Weeks Marine—conceived of the competitors as a approach to “appeal to college students into the heavy development trade” after listening to his buddy and co-founder, Lambrechts, speak about his imaginative and prescient for extending the MBTA Blue Line westward. 

“Each pupil who has been concerned over the previous three years,” Roma says, “has given nothing however rave evaluations with the method. Essentially the most-heard remark I’ve heard from older people within the trade is that they wished that they had this once they had been going via college.”

To make the competitors much more life like this yr, the groups had been knowledgeable on the finish of the day that the CIM-LRD govt committee issued a change order, with a further $10,000 going to every college. The cash was divided equally among the many pupil members.

Moreover Pine, the opposite judges this yr included Dave Puser, the manager director of the Moles; Brendan Casey, an MBTA mission supervisor; Aaron Lewis, a senior principal at SGH; Joe Allegro, proprietor of Allegro Building Companies and Tom Day, director of estimating at Skanska USA Civil Northeast.

Earlier than the profitable groups had been introduced, Day—who was given the identical package deal as the scholars this previous fall—offered his “unbiased skilled analysis” to the group. 

Lucy Jen, professor of the follow at Tufts College and principal geotechnical engineer at Jen Geotechnical LLC, served as an trade coach for the second-place Tufts group together with Alison Bulman from Skanska. Jen, who additionally coached Tufts final yr, stated the competitors is a good alternative for civil engineering undergraduate college students to use “what they’ve realized in addition to exposing them to different features of the design and development course of not lined of their undergraduate curriculum.”

She added that it’s an “wonderful springboard for undergraduates getting into engineering follow” as a result of it helps them study to “work in groups, apply what they’ve realized in lessons, study new skillsets, excellent their presentation abilities, determine their pursuits and admire completely different approaches by different groups.”