When I came to Brigham Young University–Idaho in 2012 to help start the Civil Engineering Program, I reflected on the excellent educational experiences I previously had. While my classroom learning was necessary and valuable, my greatest education came through my work experiences with employers. The hands-on practical experience was invaluable. I determined that I would share my experiences with my students, as many have done at this great university. My colleagues Nathan Harris and Keith Bourgeous have done the same. Combined, we share over 30 years of experience with our students. We also recognized that the hands-on experience is just as critical to our student’s education.

Some avenues for hands-on experience have come through internships and excellent capstone projects provided by outstanding engineers from the surrounding area who willingly mentor our students. Another source of engineering experience comes from our student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the competitions ASCE sponsors nationally.

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Competing for a Complete Education: The Value of National Student SocietiesJIM L AWRENCE WITH ADDIT IONS BY DARNELLE MARTINEZ & GILMORE JENKINS

Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering

I distinctly remember my first day of work after graduating from Utah State University in civil engineering. I had accepted a position at the Utah Department of Transportation, and my first assignment was in their materials division. My supervisor brought a new employee and myself into a room to explain to us what work we would be doing over the next several weeks. I pulled out a notebook, as I had done in all of my college classes, and prepared to take copious notes. My supervisor looked at me and said, “You don’t need that. You’re not in school anymore.” I was deflated. While I had an excellent theoretical education, I had little idea of what to expect when I entered the engineering workforce. I am the son of a florist, who was the son of a florist, who was the son of a florist. I had worked two internships for a very small business that did surveying and land development in Grace and Preston, Idaho. While I had learned to work hard, I knew little of how a large engineering agency functioned or what my role would be. Fortunately, I eventually figured it out.

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While internships and capstone projects are wonderful tools for education beyond the classroom experience, there is something unique about students’ participation in the ASCE Pacific Northwest Student Conference and competitions. In the past, undergraduates at BYU-I had the opportunity to participate in surveying, concrete bocce ball, steel putter/concrete golf ball, steel bridge, environmental/water filtration, and concrete canoe competitions. Each brings its own set of challenges. In many ways, the competitions and conference provide “the whole package” for our students, including:

• Leadership Experience

• Design Experience

• Written and Oral Communication Experience

• Construction Experience

• Specification Reading and Interpretation

Experience

• Project Management Experience

• Problem Solving Experience

• Teamwork and Collaboration Networking

Throughout their education, students are exposed to some of these areas in the classroom; however, some topics are covered lightly or not covered at all due to the limited time we have with our students. The competitions offer excellent avenues for exposing the students to these areas. Allow me to elaborate on the following areas: construction experience, specification reading and interpretation experience, and project management experience.

Construction ExperienceAs civil engineers, we rarely construct what we design. In

the professional world, an engineer creates the designs that are passed on to a contractor who builds the final product to the engineer’s specifications. This lack of experience

can create a disconnect between the contractor and the engineer. Sometimes, limited construction experience leads engineers to design systems that are difficult or impossible to construct. In each of our competitions, the students are required to construct the final product. Through this process, they learn construction skills that help them to see their designs from a contractor’s point of view. Students learn to design according to engineering and construction constraints. They begin to ask themselves,

“If I design this in this way, can it be constructed?” This was the case when they designed the mold for their concrete canoe; their designs seemed perfect until they began to put the mold together or place the concrete. Through this experience, students learn to look beyond engineering.

Specification Reading and Interpretation Experience

Many of the projects that engineers work on require knowledge of the standards and specifications required for safe design. This means that engineers must be able to read and interpret the meaning of each specification. Sometimes, engineers have to write their own specifications for unique designs. The ASCE competitions are typically based on a set of rules or guidelines that are written in specification format. Students are required to read and re-read the specifications to ensure that their final product is correct. Any deviation from the specification leads to a loss of points. This exposure to tight specifications creates within our students an understanding of the importance of thorough review and complete writing of specifications.

Project Management ExperienceAt some point in their career, most civil engineers will

end up in project management. This requires engineers

...These conferences have been a great opportunity ... to work directly with our students and to provide them with experiences and direction that we cannot accomplish in the classroom.

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to be able to create and follow budgets, estimates, and schedules, among many other things. This is an area where the ASCE competitions provide a deep and significant experience for our students. Other schools throughout the country are allowed to get sponsors for their design, construction, and transportation costs for the competitions. Some schools will raise more than $50,000 each year for their expenses. Our students are limited to contributions of material goods and university, college, and department funds. This equates to working under an extremely tight budget. They learn the frugality and faith spoken of by Elder Henry B. Eyring in his address, “A Steady, Upward Course”. These experiences are creating the type of employees that future employers will talk and wonder about in amazement!

Student ExamplesDarnelle Martinez and

Gilmore Jenkins are two students who have shown leadership, innovation, and a strong work ethic to make these programs successful. Darnelle led our environmental competition team while Gilmore was the concrete canoe captain. The following is a description of their experiences.

Darnelle Martinez: The Water Filter

“Imagine finding yourself stranded in a community just ravaged by earthquake and volcanic eruption. At that time,

it is presumed that fixing the power supply and the damaged clean water source will take one month. Despite all the commotion in the community, people still need to do their daily activities such as laundry, cooking, taking a shower, and consuming clean water. Only the stormwater found in a nearby retention pond is available to sustain these needs. How could you

survive in this dire situation?For this year’s American Society of Civil Engineer

(ASCE) Student Conference Environmental Competition, it was our task to build a water filtration system capable of filtering undesirable particles, such as colloids and pathogens that makes the water risky to drink, and to provide a clean water resource to sustain the needs of a community for a month. To build an ingenious yet simple water filtration system, we considered the following: accessibility of materials, price, and ease of assembly.

The cross-section of our water filter design, including the materials used to build it, is shown in Figure 1.

As you may have guessed, the event described in the beginning was only a hypothetical situation. The people in

Figure 1 Cross section of the water filter that shows the materials used to

build the water filter dimensions, and amount of materials used.

While my classroom learning was necessary and valuable, my greatest education came through my work experiences with employers.

6,000D

5,000D

12,000D

1,000D

7,000D

ROCK

SAND

1 lAYER OF FELT

3 LAYERS OF COFFEE FILTER

30 PIECES COTTON BALLS

BOTTOM LID

Majority of the materials used to build this water filtration system are just ordinary household materials, with the exception of the sand and PVC pipe which can be accessible in local hardware stores. These chosen materials are ideal to build water filter that is effecient enough to remove unwanted particles mixed with water. Once the materials are gathered, it is only a matter of short time to build the water filter. In the end, the water filter itself cost around $13.00. It was also able to filter 9 liters of water within 15 minutes and the filtered water ended up within acceptable ph.

CROSS SECTION OF THE WATER FILTER

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charge of facilitating this competition designed a scenario to challenge the students. Participating in the competition helped the students apply engineering principles and skills that they had learned from their classroom experiences. The competition also helped the students think of realistic and practical solutions that would sustain people in this

hypothetical crisis. Thanks to the help of students from the BYU-I Environmental Engineering class, we acquired data from each water filter they built on campus. This helped our team determine the desirable materials for building the water filter. Furthermore, thanks to the advice of Brother Keith Bourgeous, a member of the Civil Engineering faculty, we ended up creating a water filter with optimal results. What seemed to be a daunting task became hopeful because of their help. The rest of the construction process, such as determining the right amount of sand and cotton balls to optimize the water quality coming out from the

filter, was done by performing several tests by our team. We named ourselves “Zale” because it means the power of the sea. Our team was comprised of three people: Mikayla Shirley, Tanner Howe, and me, Darnelle Martinez. We also had help from Cindy Acevedo, Renata Flores, and Dafne Espinosa, who created our poster board; and Gilmore Jenkins, who created our water filter stand. After the intense but friendly competition, our team won the Best Water Filtration System award and an overall Third Place.

What seemed to be an ordinary competition on the surface has reshaped my perspective of civil engineering. I have a better picture of the reality of my career choice through this competition; I used to solely focus on theories, but now I’ve drawn closer to finding practical solutions that would benefit the public.

Since the competition ended, I have focused on honing the skills I was lacking (e.g. learning to effectively use AutoCAD). With these skills, I will be an efficient contributor in my profession, and I will be more conscious of future decisions I could make as a civil engineer. This will help me impact the community and the public interest in a good way.”

Gilmore Jenkins: The Concrete Canoe“As students at BYU-Idaho, we take classes that

theoretically prepare us to be effective contributors in our future jobs and careers. I have had the opportunity to expand my knowledge through both coursework and practical experience. Along with internships, I had the opportunity to participate in the American Society of Civil Engineers Regional Student Conference and Competition as the Concrete Canoe Team Captain. The competition included designing and building the canoe throughout the fall and winter semesters and then competing with other schools in the Pacific Northwest Region.

The design process included designing the shape of the canoe and determining how to build the form to hold the fresh concrete in the desired shape. We also designed the concrete mix ourselves with the goal of creating a light-weight concrete that was strong enough to support up to four students as they raced against the other schools. To make these calculated decisions, we applied concepts learned from materials science, physics, fluid mechanics, and other engineering courses. Once the design was

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sound, we determined if it was buildable. Engineers do not always get to construct their designs. Just because something looks good on paper doesn’t mean the pieces will actually fit together. This scenario can provide large amounts of tension between the builder and the designer. The opportunity to see a project come to life is a valuable opportunity that creates a new perspective toward the design phase of a project.

Throughout this entire process, a technical report was compiled that outlined all of our design work, calculations, material testing, and construction of the canoe. This report was a mandatory entry into the competition that the judges used to determine if the canoe was compliant to the rules sent out at the beginning of the process. This first part of the judging occurred before the competition. The report had to be submitted on time, otherwise, we would have received major score penalties. The other items that were judged were the canoe itself and our understanding of the process and work that went into its design and construction. This was done through a display table, an oral presentation, and racing the canoe in the water against our fellow engineers.

This past year, the competition was held in Lacey, Washington. During our travel there, the canoe sheared in half, leaving us with two pieces of a canoe. This was one of the most disheartening experiences of my school career.

Several hundred hours of our hard work appeared to be for not. However, Brother Nathan Harris and Brother Keith Bourgeous, civil engineering professors at BYU-Idaho, encouraged us to fix the canoe. We were allowed to make repairs to the canoe with tape. And we did. We engineered the number of strips of Gorilla Tape needed to support us while out in the water. The canoe floated, and we did very well in the races considering the canoe was in two pieces only hours before.

I will always be appreciative of the time and effort that the professors put in to allow us, as students, the opportunity to compete against other students, collaborate with them, and network with them. The only reason I am still in the Civil Engineering Program is because of Brother Jim Lawrence, Brother Nathan Harris, and Brother Keith Bourgeous’s enthusiasm for the courses they teach and their professional experience before they came to BYU-Idaho. I truly feel that the Concrete Canoe Competition was the perfect way for students to work closer with them and gain similar enthusiasm for the career path of Civil Engineering.”

Laying the Foundation for Future ProfessionalsDarnelle and Gilmore are only two examples of the

benefit these competitions and conferences provide for our students. As civil engineering faculty, these conferences have been a great opportunity for Nathan Harris, Keith Bourgeous, and me to work directly with our students and to provide them with experiences and direction that we cannot accomplish in the classroom. We see the students becoming “life-long teachers in their families, in the church and in their work, and they will bless others wherever they go by what they have learned about innovating with scarce resources and treating all they have as if it were the Lord’s…[They are] natural leaders who know how to teach and how to learn. [They] have the power to innovate and improve without requiring more of what money can buy… [They are] becom[ing] legendary for their capacity to build people around them and to add value wherever they serve.”1 t

References

1. Eyring, Elder Henry B. (2001, September). BYU-Idaho Devotional. Retrieved from http://www.byui.edu/foundational-addresses/a-steady-upward-course