For the Tufts Steel Bridge Team, planning and communication are the foundation for success in competition
Have you ever wondered what it takes to construct a steel bridge, like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Brooklyn Bridge?
The first building block is teamwork, say the three Tufts seniors who are leading the design and construction of a scale model steel bridge to compete in the Northeast Regional American Institute of Steel Construction Student Steel Bridge Competition. Their team earned second place in last year’s competition.
Co-captains Kaitlin Maloney, Cecy Sweeney, and Ethan Kessler lead eight younger students in the Tufts University chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers in designing a bridge in preparation for the competition, which will be held in April.
Last semester, the Steel Bridge Team members received the competition rules, site constraints, and other parameters they will need to follow for the competition. Then, they created a line model of the bridge in CAD, a digital design program.
This semester, they built a 3-D model before sending the plans to a fabricator who builds the model bridge pieces. Now they are practicing constructing the bridge on repeat.
In the competition, they must beat approximately 15 other schools to build the bridge as fast as possible under spatial constraints. Their score is based on the speed in which they build the bridge, its structural efficiency under load, its weight and aesthetics, and how much it deflects or bends.
Of the full team, four people are selected a few weeks before the competition to be on the build team, which may or may not include some of the co-captains. The top three teams in the regional round will advance to the national competition.
How do the team captains balance responsibilities and construct such a feat? The co-captains say making design decisions to score well in all the judging categories is crucial. “We ask ourselves how much of a risk do we want to take?” Sweeney said. “We kind of try to do something a little bit in the middle.”
Photo: Andy Kwok
Tufts Steel Bridge Team co-captains Kaitlin Maloney, Cecy Sweeney, Ethan Kessler. They’re preparing for this year's Northeast Regional AISC Student Steel Bridge Competition in April.
What word would you use to describe your team?
Cecy Sweeney: I want to say fulfilling. It’s fun most of the time, but it's also stressful, but it’s very rewarding. Especially getting to teach the younger students and see them grow.
Ethan Kessler: I’m going to say culminating. I think it ties all the classes that we've taken together.
Kaitlin Maloney: Educational because I think I have learned more than I expected to by joining this team, even joining as an upperclassman as a junior, I relearned CAD through it and learned a lot of real-world skills that I wouldn’t have necessarily in pen-and-paper classes.
How do you work together to minimize stress in this competition?
Kessler: We start build practices pretty early so that we can have more than just the four people learn to build the bridge, so we can give different people a chance in different roles. Getting people comfortable in their roles hopefully can reduce the stress.
Maloney: Last year was my first year on the team and I was a builder, and I think it was stressful getting to learn all the different rules, like if you drop a bolt, it’s a time deduction from your score. I think taking it step by step was helpful.
Sweeney: You have to find the balance of knowing we could do all this work to make the perfect bridge, but if we do that, we’re not going to finish in time. I think it’s stressful, but it’s also really fun and it’s a challenge.
What do you think makes this team so special?
Sweeney: We have great advisors, but they also encourage us to do the work ourselves. I think Tufts also has a lot of people that are enthusiastic about bridges. We’ve gotten good at doing the most with the resources that we have and optimizing our strategy.
Kessler: I also think we don’t really look at each year as being independent of each other. This year, for example, the bridge is like a little bit of a cantilever on one side. That hasn't happened in previous years, but there’s still things that you can learn from looking at our old bridges and other schools’ bridges that they've made in the past that we can apply to our bridge this year, even for a totally new challenge.
What do you hope people take away from your success?
Sweeney: I hope it gets people more excited about civil engineering. When people outside the field hear about it, it's not like, “Oh, yay, bridges.” But it can be a very fun thing and can show how important teamwork can be.
Maloney: We talked about the stressful situations of the competition, but it never actually feels too stressful because of the team dynamic that we have.
What advice would you give to someone interested in joining the team?
Kessler: You’re going to feel like you don’t know anything, but we’re all learning as we go—especially for an underclassman. We wouldn’t expect you to have a lot of experience doing anything even remotely like this. The quicker you join, the faster you're going to learn and be ahead of everyone else in your class.
Maloney: Yeah, I agree. I only joined last year, so I think I would have learned a lot by joining earlier. Don’t be intimidated by the skill set you think you might need because even us as seniors need a recap on a lot of the skills.
Sweeney: Even if you feel like you have no idea what’s going on, just do it anyway. You learn more than you think, and we’re all learning. We’re all doing it for the first time because it's a different bridge each year and it’s a different challenge. And there's always something new to learn.
How do you work through adversity?
Kessler: Sometimes our schedules don’t align, sometimes one person wants to get something done a little bit sooner, but I think it’s just about being communicative. We all have the same goal in mind at the end. We can bounce ideas off each other. We’re pretty much on the same page on most things.
What are you hoping to accomplish in this year’s competition?
Sweeney: We want to place well again. It’s always a shot in the dark because it depends so much on how well the other schools do, and you have no idea how other schools approach the challenge until you get to regionals.
But I think also just creating a fun and a rewarding experience for the underclassmen is one of the goals. We will feel good about it as long as we're doing the best we can. We’ve put so much work and so much effort into this that I already feel proud of us and proud of the whole team.
Maloney: Just having a fabricated bridge to show all the work that we’ve done all year is something commendable in itself. I think that it will be exciting to get the physical, completed bridge.
Kessler: The only way to improve is to get first place.
