A team of Washington State University construction management and design students recently earned second place in the Design-Build Institute of America’s national student competition in Las Vegas.
“The student competitions are as close to real life in the design and construction industry as possible. The DBIA student competition is a competition that forces the involvement and collaboration of students in the design disciplines with the construction management students,” said David Gunderson, the team advisor and associate professor of WSU’s School of Design and Construction (SDC).
DBIA is a national organization that promotes the integration of design and construction industries to more effectively carry out high-performance projects. In the competition, students were required to develop planning documents for construction projects. In the first phase, they developed a fictitious company and a design solution for a proposed construction project. During a one-week period in October, they then had to produce a design plan, schedule and cost estimates for a fictitious parking facility with a recreation field and classrooms.
The WSU team included SDC students Marie Landsverk, Connor Schneider, Steven Bradshaw, Christie Andresen, and Sam Rykken.
“This was the first-time I had the opportunity to work on a design project with students outside my program of interior design,” said Andresen. “We had to learn where our programs overlapped to create the strongest project possible and delegate tasks, which at times that was tricky to define.”
Thirty-one teams from twenty-three universities participated in the competition.
“To have an effective team you can’t be isolated and do your part then bring it all together. If you want to have a strong proposal you need to work together through the entire process and collaboratively create a unified proposal,” said Schneider.