In Brief
Great news in the last year from our students, faculty, alumni and supporters.
Why Civil Engineering is #1 in Three Stories
1. It’s a Four-Peat!
Our civil engineering student team has now won the ASC Design-Build competition for the fourth year in a row. When the team won for the third year in a row in 2021, the last time that happened was 15 years ago. A fourth consecutive win extends them into unprecedented territory.
The ASC Design-Build Competition’s the largest of its kind. It tasks student teams with winning over fictional clients as fictional construction, design, and architecture firms. Typically, crafting a proposal for a client is a lengthy process, but the competition crunches it down to a 16-hour challenge. Conceptual design; cost analysis; construction scheduling; mechanical, electrical, and plumbing; and sustainability analysis—all this and more must be done in less than a day.
“Our team’s sacrifices, grit, and perseverance are what allowed us to practice for 10 months and around 500+ hours to achieve this feat,” says Ayman Jaber, civil engineering student and the team’s co-captain. “But the true prize was building friendships and connections along the way.”
2. No. 1 in International Water Quality Conference
A civil engineering student team took first place at the largest water quality conference in the country, the Water Environment Federation's Technical Exhibition and Conference in Nov. 2021. They won for their proposal on restoring the Puddingstone Reservoir—a 250-acre artificial lake originally designed to control floods. The team worked with two industry advisors and the vice president of business development at West Land Group, Inc., as well as an industry advisor and the principal from John Robinson Consulting, Inc. The student team prepared an extensive proposal with cost-effective, low-impact development solutions that would protect water quality by leveraging the reservoir’s natural features.
3. Top 5 in National Steel Bridge Competition
A civil engineering student team delivered unprecedented results in the 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers Steel Bridge national competition.
Tasked with planning, designing, fabricating, and constructing a one-tenth model steel bridge, the civil engineering student team landed first in stiffness and structural efficiency. This marks the first time the team came out on top in these categories, and the second year in a row to land in the top five among a competitive group of over 30 universities.
Photo caption: Students from the winning team. From left to right: Citlalli Vazquez, Francis Manansala, Jordan Chung, and Ryan Huang.
The White House Awards Stalwart Chemical and Materials Engineering Professor
The White House awarded Winny Dong, Ph.D., chemical and materials engineering professor and faculty director of the Office of Undergraduate Research, the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring.
“I am tremendously grateful for this recognition,” Dong says. “This award motivates me to continue creating opportunities where all students can thrive and to create and grow mentoring programs both within and outside of my home institution.”
Dong has been part of Cal Poly Pomona for 22 years, and we hope she’s here for plenty more. Read more about her here [LINK NEEDED].
STEM Success Network Supports Students Across all STEM Colleges
In an effort to amplify student success efforts across the engineering, science, and agriculture colleges, the STEM Success Network shares best practices for outreach, recruitment, retention, and graduation in all three colleges.
Under this umbrella network is a host of student success services that connect and collaborate to broaden and build new and existing efforts. For example, the college’s Maximizing Engineering Potential (MEP) and Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) programs have joined to form MEP-WiSE. In tandem, the program combines resources to scale up and enhance the quality of services and student success tracking previously not possible.
MEP-WiSE offers free summer bridge/transition programs, tutoring and supplemental instruction, workshops, peer mentoring, career development, digital badges for leadership training, and scholarships and stipends for hundreds of underrepresented and low-income students. Further, the program’s assistance extends past engineering students by supporting science and agriculture students who also benefit from the STEM Success Network.