Posted on May 4, 2008 - by Elliott
The Importance of Student Design Competitions
I surf over to the UNR website every couple of days. I like to stay in the loop on the big UNR news.
Today, when stopped by, I read that the UNR Concrete Canoe team took first place at the ASCE Mid Pacific Conference at UC Davis. (Sorry, there were a lot of links in that last sentence. As a new blogger I am trying to balance giving information with not making a whole sentence hyperlinked.)
First off, congratulations to the crew at UNR. This is quite an accomplishment. The Mid Pacific region has one of the toughest competitors in the nation: UC Berkeley. They have represented the region 15 times at nationals. Of those 15 finishes, the have only once appeared outside the top 10. They are only one of four schools with back to back first place finishes and the only school to do this twice. All other amazing stats regarding Berkeley can be found here.
Second off, the rise of the UNR Canoe team is simply amazing. The Canoe Team did not exist three years ago. The last time UNR competed was sometime in the mid to late 90s. In three years they have come from non existence, to going to nationals three consecutive years in a row, placing 3rd in 2007. For more on the rise of UNR, go over to http://www.nevadacanoe.com/.
Mid-Pac has produced other canoe powerhouses such as Sacramento (stats, website), and Davis. For UNR to compete so successfully against this level of competition just adds to the legend. (All of these sites have been obtained from concretecanoe.org, an obsessively updated canoe website.)
I cannot emphasize how important student competitions like Concrete Canoe are in the education of undergraduate students. I participated in the Steel Bridge competition for two years while at UNR. I gained many skills that I could never have gathered in the classroom. Not to say that my education was lacking content (quite the opposite), but there are some things best learned in a collaborative, self motivated, student run environment like a design competition.
Some of the best times I had in college were in the bottom of the structures laboratory learning how hard a true pin connection is to fabricate. Without steel bridge, I would have never have learned how to weld, use a chop saw, lay out steel from a self generated set of shop drawings, and maybe most importantly, I would have never seen what a bearing failure in a connection looked like (or how to fix it).
Bottom line, if you are a student, get involved! Steel bridge, concrete canoe, water treatment, anything. While giving a little back, you will get so much more in return.
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