A group of nine Tufts undergraduates took home first place at a national environmental design competition in New Mexico last week. The contest, sponsored by the Waste-management and Education Consortium (WERC), involved the design of a sustainable community in the remote southwest.
Competition organizers required teams to develop, design, and present comprehensive proposals to transform a hypothetical remote area, "Brownville," into an efficient and environmentally-friendly community. Students presented their creations to a panel of judges comprised of representatives from local municipalities and other government agencies.
"The idea was to try the minds of the students," civil and environmental engineering professor Chris Swan said. "The contest proposals provide ideas to people, and the sponsors are often intimately involved with people in fields such as the EPA and the Department of Energy."
Proposals may be used in future work efforts in remote areas of the US that lack modern infrastructure and other utilities. "What they were doing was developing a novel system for getting drinking water and electricity for a rural community of moderate to low income," said John Durant, the faculty advisor to the team. "Their results will be directly applicable to rural community development in New Mexico."
The Tufts team, led by student leader Christina Correa and faculty from the department of civil and environmental engineering, competed with nine other teams throughout the course of the week-long competition, held at New Mexico State University. In addition to winning first place, the team was awarded a $2,500 prize, which team members say will likely go to the civil and environmental engineering department.
The experience gained from the contest might prove valuable for the participants' futures, particularly because many of the judges were looking to hire promising team members upon graduation.
"The fact that we won opened up a lot of opportunities for us in New Mexico," said senior team member Sarah Wilding, who is considering working there after graduating.
Students registered for the event last October as part of their capstone design course for the engineering school and began working on the design in January.
Both students and faculty were proud of their accomplishment.
"We've been involved for six of the last seven years, and I've always viewed this strictly as an educational experience - but this year it's nice to win," Swap said.
"One of the reasons we were so successful this year is that we, better than any other groups, fulfilled the project objectives," Durant said. "The students really went about that enthusiastically and brought a lot of fresh insight to that particular challenge."
This year's competition marked the eleventh annual WESC contest and the first which Tufts won.
