Johns Hopkins Wins Sustainable Solutions; Penn State Takes Home Surveying Honors
Fairmont, W.Va. — After three days of intense competition, students from Western Kentucky University won the Concrete Canoe Competition at the American Society of Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) Civil Engineering Student Championships held at Fairmont State University in Fairmont, West Virginia from June 25-27. This is WKU’s first time winning the Society-wide Concrete Canoe Competition. Students from Johns Hopkins University won ASCE’s Sustainable Solutions Competition, and the team from Pennsylvania State University won the ASCE Utility Engineering and Surveying Institute Surveying Competition. All three teams are first-time winners of ASCE Society-wide student competitions.
This year’s student championships are the culmination of 21 regional student symposia held in the United States, China, and India this spring. Those events included three Society-wide competitions that teach students skills they’ll utilize daily in their civil engineering careers: the ASCE Concrete Canoe Competition, the ASCE Utility Engineering and Surveying Institute Surveying Competition and the Sustainable Solutions Competition.
In ASCE’s flagship competition, Concrete Canoe, teams are evaluated and scored based on a combination of the final canoe product, oral presentations, a design paper, and the race results. This year’s canoes were tested on Friday at Tygart Lake State Park with slalom and sprint races. Concrete Canoe has been ASCE’s flagship student competition since 1988 and challenges civil engineering students to apply engineering principles, project management and team-building skills.
This year’s Concrete Canoe champion, Western Kentucky University, has consistently been a top contender at recent Society-wide finals. The team finished in third place last year and came in fifth place in 2023 and 2024.
“Going into this year, we wanted to create a new hull design to help us move through the water faster during races, because we always thought that's what our problem was with not being able to get higher than third place in nationals,” said WKU Co-Captain Sophia Adams. “So, going in, we said, 'The hull design is what we need to focus on.' And sure enough, it really was.”
Western Kentucky’s canoe, the USS Alliance, honored an American Revolution era warship of the same name. The team’s display honored America’s 250th Anniversary which is being celebrated this year.
“We have quite a few family members within our team that have served our country, fought for the freedom that we have today,” said WKU Co-Captain Luke Evans. “We wanted to honor that; we wanted to honor all the men and women that have served in our military. We knew that if we were going do a theme like this, it's not something that you can do halfway.”
The USS Alliance weighs 182 pounds and is 19 feet 6 inches long. In addition to winning the overall competition, WKU’s Concrete Canoe team received top honors for their technical presentation and final product.
“The skills, talent, and dedication to the profession on display at the Civil Engineering Student Competition Championships is inspiring and demonstrates just how bright the future is for these students. They will indeed have lasting impact working as civil engineers for the communities they serve around the world,” said ASCE President Marsha Anderson Bomar, Ph.D., F.ASCE. “Congratulations to the winning teams on their hard-earned victories after months of research, preparation, and intense competition. ASCE student competitions help set future civil engineers up for success in the profession and in life. I am excited to see the positive contributions each one of these students will make and how they will inspire others throughout their civil engineering careers.”
In ASCE’s Sustainable Solutions Competition, the team from Johns Hopkins University won top honors for the proposal it developed for a new data center that requires enhanced sustainability goals, including the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure’s Envision framework as the primary sustainability framework. This competition challenges teams to incorporate sustainable practices into real-world project scenarios that they will regularly face in their civil engineering careers.
Penn State University won the ASCE Surveying Competition. This competition recognizes the importance of basic surveying principles to all civil engineering projects and ways to solve common problems they will encounter in their careers. In this competition, teams completed and will present a preliminary subdivision mapping project and finish four field tasks that are part of the surveying process.
Team Rankings
Concrete Canoe
- Western Kentucky University
- Missouri University of Science and Technology
- New York University - Tandon
Surveying
- Pennsylvania State University
- California Baptist University
- Stony Brook University
Sustainable Solutions
- Johns Hopkins University
- Georgia Tech
- University of Central Florida
ASCE and Fairmont State University organized the ASCE Civil Engineering Student Championships with generous support from the ASCE Foundation, and other sponsors.
Click here for more information on the ASCE Civil Engineering Student Championships, including a list of all the winners.
About the American Society of Civil Engineers
Founded in 1852, the American Society of Civil Engineers represents more than 160,000 civil engineers worldwide and is America's oldest national engineering society. ASCE works to raise awareness of the need to maintain and modernize the nation's infrastructure using sustainable and resilient practices, advocates for increasing and optimizing investment in infrastructure, and improve engineering knowledge and competency. For more information, visit www.asce.org or www.infrastructurereportcard.org and follow us on X (Formerly Twitter), @ASCETweets and @ASCEGovRel.