ASC Competition

This past week was one of the craziest weeks I've had this past year. On Wednesday morning at 4 a.m. I left for Reno to go and compete in a Design Build competition. We had been preparing for the past five months, me and five other BYU students. We arrived at the Nugget Casino in Reno around 1 p.m. We had to wait about an hour to get into our rooms because the hotel was overflowing with construction management students. BYU took around 50 students to compete in 8 different events. After getting into our rooms we set up our computers and moved a bunch of tables into one of the rooms, which was made into the work room. After we had finished setting up for the competition it was time to go to dinner. When we got to the room where the dinner was to be held the place was once again overflowing with students and teachers. There were about 600 students packed into a huge conference room. Before we could eat we had to listen to a speaker. I thought it would be a short speech, but I was mistaken. The man talked for an hour and a half. I thought my stomach was going to eat itself before the man finished. After that we ate, watched a drawing and then we headed off to bed. I woke up to my roommates alarm clock at 5 a.m. The competition didn't start till 7 a.m., so I was surprised that he was getting up so early. I later found out that he thought we were starting at 6 a.m. Needless to say my morning was shot and I didn't get any more sleep. At seven we made our down to the designated room and were given our problem, which consisted of a packet of papers that contained the instructions to build a student services center. We were told that we would have the next 17 hours to design a building and turn in the required write-ups. When we got back to our room we passed out the papers and started the process of reading through the lengthy packet and coming up with a design. After reading we were notified by one of the designers that he didn't have the architecture program installed on his computer, so we only had five computers instead of six to work with. This proved to be the start of many disastrous events that would precede that day. For the next couple of ours we all worked on our assignments, but unfortunately for us the designers fell way behind schedules and could not decided on how to design the building. It ended up takin ten hours for them to design the exterior shell, a job that should have only taken about an hour. This of course through everyone else off schedule and spelled disaster for us. I was working on write-ups and developing a site plan, but was missing a crucial piece, the layout of the new building. I was supposed to be done with site plans around 12 p.m., but didn't receive the building layout till about 8 p.m. I had been of course doing write-ups during the rest of the time as well as helping to design landscape features, but the delay really hurt our schedule, because I had to go back through and use a lot of my time inserting the new building into the site plan. Another area that really hurt our team was the fact that the designer, who hadn't loaded the program into his computer, didn't know how to use the architectural program. When he was given a computer to use, he proved to be entirely worthless. Meanwhile the rest of us had to make up for this and do our best. Another problem we encountered was that our writer decided to try and help the designers and rather than making sure that all the write-ups were done and installed in one file he spent his time with the designers trying to do their job. Again, a disastrous turn of events for our team. Meanwhile the rest of us, the remaining four, are having to do a six person job. We were supposed to have finished around ten o'clock p.m., but due to the reasons given above we were way behind schedule. The designers didn't finish until 11:30 p.m. which killed us because there was no time to print and our color printer stopped working. Also when we went to turn in the electric copy of all the documents we found that the writer hadn't done his job and that all the writing material was scattered on different computers which made it impossible to put them all in one file. It was extremely frustrating. The failures of our design team coupled with our writer not fulfilling his duty decimated our chances of winning. Our hard work was in vain and needlessly to say we didn't win. We did however get everyone to pull themselves together and create a good presentation, which was helpful for those of us who did a good job, because there were many recruiters there watching us. It was a long week for me, especially since most of us had worked so hard. I've decided that you can learn a lot about people when you are forced to work with them in a pressure filled environment. It allows you to see who they really are. The plus side to the competition was that I learned a lot and was able to meet a lot of HR people from various construction companies on the west coast.