Our board celebrated its last meeting of the semester with a secret santa gift exchange! After everyone opened their gifts, each person had to guess who gave it to them, which was harder than you’d think given the size of our board.
Overall this was a great way to end our semester. A lot of work goes into organizing everything for ASCE and we’ve already started getting ready for an exciting spring semester. Through our weekly 9pm board meetings, as well as working outside of the meetings, our board has put in a terrific effort this semester; none of our events would be possible without everyone’s dedication & commitment to making USC ASCE awesome!
We held our second general meeting of the semester and hosted the ASCE Younger Members Forum Student Roundup, with several other universities in attendance.
Lots and lots of scrumptious food from Pasta Roma. Yum!
Getting ready for our meeting! Everyone seems to be enjoying the food!
Berkeley and Alice are busy preparing their notecards for something awesome!
A networking activity! So that’s what the notecards were for! Practical, helpful, and most definitely fun!
Lots of good conversations are to be had at our general meetings!
Our Concrete Canoe team is going to be amazing this year. Be sure to talk to Jake and Nick to get involved! And check out that theme! Planets! Whoa!
Our bold and fearless leader, the president of our chapter, Elise! Yay!
We had a great time at the YMF Student Roundup as well! We hosted many other schools from the region, and got a chance to meet some young professionals currently working in the civil field.
It was so much fun! Lots of interesting conversations! Be sure to join us next semester! We’ll be looking for you!
A group of USC ASCE members got up early on this Saturday morning to help completely rebuild an edible garden at Vine St. Elementary School. Tomás O’Grady of Enrich LA led a team of about 80 volunteers to clear out the old, unmaintained garden and build new raised beds, an irrigation system, a wooden fence, and picnic tables. After six hours in the sun, construction was complete and other groups began planting a variety of vegetables. We got valuable experience that will benefit our design teams’ work, including sanding (we’ll sand our concrete canoe), staining (also staining the canoe), and piping a irrigation system (our environmental design team’s system consists of pipes). Overall, it was a great experience, and we hope to be able to participate in another similar event soon!
We started by sanding wood for picnic tables.
Sanding wood
Water break
Sanding part of the fencing
Fence sanding
Carrying a section of fencing
Carrying a section of fencing
Sanding the fence
Break time
At least someone‘s working…
Stacking wood to be finished
Lunch break USC group shot
Staining/Finishing the wood for the picnic benches
Sealing wood
Brushing off a tabletop
Staining the benches
We also helped assemble the piping for the new irrigation system.
Members of last year’s environmental design team got lots of experience with piping, so they were perfect for this project!
Rosa glues piping together
Assembling the irrigation system in-place
Staining/sealing the fencing
The whole garden project. There were several other large groups in addition to our group from USC ASCE.
Installing the irrigation system.
Shoveling dirt
Shoveling dirt
A low angle across the new raised garden beds, while installing the irrigation system
Some creative pipework!
Assembling the last few pieces of the irrigation system.
Part of the nearly-complete irrigation system
Beginning to back-fill dirt over the irrigation system
The USC ASCE group, with project lead Thomàs O’Grady
The Garden’s progress right before our departure.
The USC group
USC group in front of the garden, as the raised beds are prepared for planting.
Thanks to everyone who joined us at our first meeting!
We had a great turnout, with 65+ students in attendance. I know several people wanted to attend but couldn’t, so you can use this post to catch up on what you missed. There are some useful links for those who were there too.
Daniel waits out side with a piece of last year’s bridge.
Evan talks about membership dues.
Daniel talks about Steel Bridge.
Winston talks about PSWC.
Rosa talks about our upcomming events.
Attentive Audience
Elise wraps up
Questions
After the main portion of the meeting, where we explained what ASCE and USC ASCE are, as well as talking about all of the different things we do, we had a brief activity for those who could stay. The assignment: create the tallest possible tower out of six sheets of (re-used!) paper and nothing else (no tape, glue, paperclips, etc.). Oh, and they had to be wind-resistant too. We had some pretty creative results!
Someone requested that we post our presentation slides, so here they are (minus our special fonts) if you want to review what we went over or in case you missed the meeting!
Remember the slideshow of images we had playing before and after our presentation? It’s actually just a page on our website that make a slideshow of all of the pictures we’ve uploaded here. Check it out!
Don’t forget about our upcoming events: PSWC Info Sessions Thursday 9/12 from 5:30-6 or 6-6:30 or Friday 9/13 from 12-12:30 (all three cover the same information and focus on our design teams) and our First Guest Speaker Meeting Monday 9/16 from 6:30-8. Make sure you join our mailing list for updates!
We’ll be at the Viterbi New Student Luau tomorrow (Thursday, August 22nd, 2013) to greet all of the incoming civil and environmental engineers and tell you more about ASCE. Be sure to stop by our table and say hi!
We’ve all recovered from PSWC 2013 (the ASCE Pacific Southwest Regional Conference) and are ready for a final summary. This year we co-hosted the conference, with most of the events taking place on the USC campus. Despite the added commitments of hosting, we were competitive in many events and made several improvements over last year.
Environmental Design Team
Our big win was our environmental team’s 1st Place finish! The team worked long hours and it paid off. Multiple design iterations, a large team, and excellent leadership enabled the group’s success. Since most of the team isn’t graduating yet, including the captains, we expect a strong showing for next year as well.
Our Environmental Design Team poses with their water distribution system at the PSWC 2013 Environmental Competition at Pardee Plaza on the USC Campus.
Concrete Canoe Team
Our Concrete Canoe made big improvements over our last several years’. For our seniors, this was the first time our canoe survived all the way until the final, coed race, when four people must race in the canoe at once. Naturally, our primary senior leaders celebrated our success by all racing together for the first time. Our final product was extremely buoyant and only faced minimal cracking issues (except during transportation). While we may not have had the prettiest canoe, it improved significantly over last year’s in aesthetics and we expect to improve further in coming years with the help of a larger team, better year-to-year knowledge transfer, and additional funding. A total of five schools were unable to race their canoes by midway through race day this year, so our solid (if heavy) canoe represents a huge accomplishment.
The Steel Bridge Team also completed a successful final product at PSWC 2013. Our bridge team is also young this year and only one team member (our head captain) is graduating, so we’re expecting better and better bridges over the next few years. We hope to grow this team larger as well, which should help ensure that we have regular strong finishes for years to come.
Overall, our conference rank for 2013 is 12th, a one-place improvement over last year, out of 18 competing schools. Detailed final scores and rankings information can be found here. But our biggest accomplishment is successfully co-hosting the conference. PSWC 2013 ran extremely smoothly thanks to the tireless work of our E-Board and PSWC planning committee, especially our Conference Co-Chairs Oscar and Theresa. Thanks to everyone’s hard work, we put on an amazing conference, while still faring well in competition!
The final day of PSWC 2013 included the Steel Bridge competition, the Geotechnical competition, Concrete Bowling and Horseshoes, the Soccer tournament, and the award ceremony.
Steel bridge photos are by Lance Hill.
The first competition of the days was concrete bowling/horseshoes.
We were disqualified from bowling because we didn’t know there was a weight limit, and we didn’t have enough team members anyway, so we headed over to the horseshoes event.
We won one point in horseshoes, with only one concrete horseshoe breaking, beating our direct opponents 1-0!
Meanwhile, the steel bridge competition was beginning at Pardee Plaza
The steel bridge team talks with the judges.
The team strategizes
The clock starts!
The team assembles the bridge.
Another view of bridge assembly,
Final assembly.
Judges evaluate our work.
Our cheering section!
The team adds the load to the bridge
loading the bridge
loading the bridge
loading the bridge
loading the bridge
The bridge is evaluated, with Mudd Hall in the background
Our bridge team captains discuss the competition
the team rests during judging
The bridge team poses in front of Mudd Hall
Team members pose on the bridge
Meanwhile, the Geotechnical design competition occurred at e-quad.
Our team prepares for competition.
Since we were hosting, several USC ASCE members were recruited to aid in judging.
Our team prepares to cut up their paper.
Our team at work.
Other schools load their designs with sand.
The competition involves creating a retaining wall out of paper that can hold both static and dynamic loads.
The CBU box, just after its failure during dynamic loading.
Our team begins to load the 500 pound of sand into the box
loading sand
There’s a strategy to ensuring the sand settles an condenses as much as possible.
Another school places their wall into their box.
Our team continues loading
The competition had many onlookers, with four schools competing at a time.
We finish up our loading.
Scoping out the intended position of the static load.
When we took the box side off, our wall held!
The wall held well with only minor leakage past the one-minute deadline
Then it failed very soon after, before additional load could be applied.
However, we did much better than in past years
The 2013 Geotech Team in competition at PSWC
While each team was responsible for filling their box with sand, we had to move it back into a pile after every school finished since we ran the event.
Our team poses with their technical board.
Other teams compete
Other teams compete
Other teams compete
Other teams compete
the competition from afar
Other teams compete
Other teams compete
A very successful design!
We were in a pretty nice spot for the competition
Some schools brought huge cheering sections
After the competition, we had to carry all of the sand back out.
The bricks got some nice fresh sand between them
After the award ceremony in the evening, the environmental team poses with their first-place trophy
All of the USC ASCE 2013 PSWC participants after the award ceremony.
Our environmental design team just took first place in the environmental competition at the 2013 ASCE Pacific Southwest Regional Conference! This team put in long hours of practice and built multiple iterations of their water distribution system. The first place win is an excellent achievement, especially considering the caliber of the other 17 competing schools!
So, it turns out that there’s a weight limit for the concrete bowling ball competition (ours was clearly way too heavy to use anyway). Fortunately, being engineers, we we able to find an alternate use for it as a soccer ball, kicking it around campus on our way to the Geotech competition. Note that a 25-pound sphere can pick up a lot of momentum…
American Society of Civil Engineers Student Chapter at the University of Southern California
