2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There is a need to inspire, recruit, and retain prospective engineers to join the civil engineering profession and help them see the diversity of the occupation and the impact graduates can have on their communities. One way to do this is through student competitions, which are a popular extracurricular activity in many civil engineering programs in the United States. A host of different professional organizations and universities have created and organized these competitions for students. Some competitions, like the Concrete Canoe, have existed since the 1960’s, while newer competitions related to Sustainability and Construction have been piloted or are now options for students. Due to the diversity of civil engineering, these competitions vary in topic and complexity.

While the civil engineering profession has developed many excellent design competitions, the reality is that other engineering professions have also continued to create new, cutting-edge, interesting competitions. The civil engineering profession may have an opportunity to create new competitions or amend current ones to make them more effective at attracting, retaining, and inspiring students. The goal of this study was to assess a sampling of the current student competitions available to all engineering students and compare their attributes. Seventy-five competitions were identified, and different aspects were compared, including the founding year, perceived student disciplines, mode and frequency of the competitions, resources required, team and participant characteristics, and participant incentives.

Results indicated that there are a significant number of student competitions across engineering disciplines. The civil engineering profession provides a plethora of competition options, similar to mechanical and electrical engineering, but the civil engineering competitions are much less likely to be cross disciplinary. Civil engineering has some of the oldest competitions, well developed regional symposiums hosted by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and continues to add competitions on a regular basis. Unlike other engineering fields, civil engineering competitions offer fewer virtual competition options, exclude graduate students from participating, allow fewer teams per university to participate (and hence fewer students overall), and have fewer attractive incentives in the form of prize money, national travel for recognition, and established industry sponsorship.