Auburn University to host southeast ASCE student symposium in Spring 2022
Published: Jul 7, 2021 9:17 AM
By Virginia Speirs
See you in March, southeast student civil engineers.
For the first time in more than a decade, Auburn University will be hosting the annual three-day southeastern student symposium for the American Society of Civil Engineers in the spring of 2022. ASCE is the largest civil engineering organization in the United States.
Because of how large the symposium has been in the past, the southeastern region has been realigned from 30 regional schools to 15 schools from Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. Auburn will be the first to host the newly realigned conference.
“Auburn last hosted the ASCE Southeast Student Conference in 2010,” said Michael Perez, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. “Hosting is on rotation basis, so every school in the conference has an opportunity to host when it’s their turn. Since Auburn was next in line to host the Southeast Student Conference, we were asked to be the host site for the realigned conference.”
During the conference, students will come in teams to compete in the construction of projects such as steel bridges and concrete canoes, and even tune in to their surveying and cornhole skills, Perez said. This year, the competition will be hosted in various buildings across campus, including the new Advanced Structural Engineering Lab.
Hosting the symposium is an honor, but it is also a great opportunity to show students from schools around the southeast what Auburn has to offer, especially as a graduate school.
“The symposium allows Auburn to showcase its top-notch facilities, students and faculty,” he said. “Not only is this an awesome opportunity for graduate student recruitment, but it also allows us to reconnect with alumni who help sponsor competitions, volunteer and serve as judges.”
More than a dozen competitions will be held over the three-day symposium, and the best teams will have the opportunity to compete at the national level, Perez said.
“The symposium is an opportunity for students to compete against other universities and put their engineering knowledge into practice,” Perez said. “Schools take the competitions very seriously, and they prepare months in advance.”
Media Contact: , jeremyhenderson@auburn.edu, 334.844.3591
Students from the Auburn University chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers participate in a concrete canoe race at the University of Florida in 2018.
