Those Lucky Larsens

So this past week I went to Reno to compete in the ASC National Competition for Construction Management. Now, most people probably don't know what this is, so to explain it quickly, it is a chance for schools all over the nation to send teams of construction management students to compete against each other. BYU sent 10 or 11 teams this year and I was on the Mechanical Team. The mechanical team focuses on all the systems in a building such as Heating, Cooling, and plumbing. We had several months to prepare for the competition and we would try to meet at least once a week to practice. When we got to Reno, We had a welcome dinner the first night where some motivational speaker talked to all 1,200 students who were there to compete. There was also a raffle at the end of the dinner and I ended up winning a 8 GB ipod nano. It was pretty amazing because I was apparently the first student from BYU to win in the raffle in several years. Anyways, the picture above is a view of the giant room where the dinner took place. It was quite the scene as there were over 40 schools represented there.

After the dinner, we got to go to the arcade (some people went to gamble) and they gave us unlimited tokens to use. As you can probably guess, we went crazy with the unlimited tokens and me and 2 other guys racked up about 26,000 tickets in a matter of a couple of hours. It was pretty impressive and so I took a picture of the giant bag of tickets we had accumulated. I think the workers got annoyed because we kept jamming their machines and making them run out of tickets.


Well the next day at 6:30 am we got our problem for the competition. We had until 11 pm that night to turn it in and we where not allowed to talk to anyone or use the internet for help. The problem was sponsored by a company called Kinetics and it was a building they had actually built. It was a 26 story high rise building in downtown Phoenix, AZ. We had to pretend like we were the mechanical contractors trying to bid to get the job. We had to get an estimate for the entire cost of all the mechanical systems in the whole building and also make a schedule for how we would do it. They were also very concerned about the logistics for the project since there was very limited space on the construction site. We went pretty crazy near the end trying to print stuff out and compile it all into a binder to give to the judges and turned it in with minutes to spare. It was all pretty stressful and we had no idea how we did. We then stayed up until about 3:30 am working on our presentation and we presented at 11 am. We were all pretty tired but I think we had a pretty strong presentation. That evening the judges did a recap of the actual project and told us the actual costs on the project. We came in fairly close as we estimated 9.5 million and the actual cost was 9 million. We weren't expecting to actually place but the next day at the awards ceremony, they announced that our team got third place in the nation in the mechanical competition. We were so surprised but really happy. Above is the trophy we received and below is me holding the trophy. It was a great experience but I am glad that it is over and to be home with my family.