Student Competition Helps Train Tomorrow’s Problem Solvers

 |  Education, Self-perform, Sundt People
Sacramento State
A team from Cal State University Sacramento won the concrete competition at ASC.

For the seventh consecutive year, Sundt made an investment in the future of the industry by supporting the Associated Schools of Construction (ASC) Student Competition in Sparks, Nevada earlier this month.

ASC is the professional association for the development and advancement of construction education, where sharing ideas and knowledge inspires, guides and promotes excellence in curricula, teaching, research and service.

“The ASC competition is a great opportunity for Sundt to get to know some of the brightest college students in the country,” said Sundt Vice President of Concrete Operations Sean Lynch. “We’re proud to play a role in educating the next generation of problem-solvers and construction leaders.”

We sponsored the concrete solutions category of the Regions 6 (Rocky Mountain) and 7 (Far West) competition. A team from California State University Sacramento won.

Our team put real-life issues before squads of college students who were tasked with developing the best approaches to solving the problems. The objective was to provoke critical thinking, display technical and presentation skills, promote teamwork and enjoy the experience.

The teams focused on the six-story, cast-in-place Sun Stone parking structure at San Diego State University, which is located next to two six-story student housing towers that were to be constructed concurrently with the garage. This problem statement focused on self-perform concrete and the teams were assigned to build the frame of the garage (e.g. slab on grade, walls, columns and decks).

The event was attended by students from dozens of colleges and universities. The conference is also a good venue for us to recruit interns who eventually could become important contributors as employee-owners.

Our concrete group was represented by Dinesh Reddy Allam, Shawn Blubaum, Kira Bruun, Michael Canter, Jesse McDonald, Tyler Menard, Gates Molitor and Carolina Silvas. Michael Morales ran our booth at the job fair. Tom Case and Dan Haag attended from our executive team.