UE Places First in Quiz Bowl at ASCE Conference

University of Evansville civil engineering students placed first in the quiz bowl portion of the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE) Great Lakes Regional Conference on April 11-12. At the event, hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UE’s quiz bowl team came in ahead of such competitors as the University of Notre Dame, Northwestern University, Purdue University-Calumet, and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

The objective of the quiz bowl challenge was to test the knowledge of civil engineering students in several categories including:

• Statics/Dynamics • Water Resources Engineering • Structural Engineering • Transportation Engineering • Geotechnical Engineering • Fluid Mechanics/Hydraulic Engineering • Environmental Engineering • Engineering Economics • Engineering Ethics • Engineering Materials • Surveying • Construction Engineering/Management

In the first round, each team answered 40 different questions. The top five teams after the first round then advanced to the last round where they were asked 10 more questions. The final standing was based on teams’ total number of points.

Members of UE’s quiz bowl team were: Jamie Johnson, James Gabe, Chris Kuester and Heather Passey.

UE placed second overall at the conference which, in addition to the quiz bowl, consisted of concrete canoe, steel bridge, professional ethics paper and presentation, environmental design, surveying, concrete materials, and mystery design.

UE student Jamie Johnson won third place in the professional ethics paper and presentation with her paper: “The Engineer’s Role in Natural Disasters.”

The concrete canoe team with project managers Christina Bernauer and Shannon Osiecki won second place with the canoe “Dark Knight.”  Category awards in the concrete canoe competition included third place in races (led by captain Hannah Okray and paddlers Jaclyn Altstadt, Aubin Fowler, Silas Bohlen, George Carroll, Forrest Plumlee and Levi Leffert), second place in design paper (led by academics captain Abby Browder), second place in presentation (with Alejandro Mojica Cadario, Carroll, Bernauer and Osiecki), and second place in final product.

The steel bridge team, led by Abby Browder and Alex Schwinghamer, improved the bridge design so that they constructed their bridge 30% faster than last year with the help of team members Hieronymus Mitchell, Noble Rassam, Hannah Kirk, and Forrest Plumlee.

Other students who were involved included: Danilo Bortoletto, Helena Leon, David Lopes, and Monica Pinto.  UE faculty advisors who traveled with the students were: Associate Professors of Civil Engineering James Allen and Mark Valenzuela and Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering Immanuel Selvaraj.