City College Takes 3rd Place at Regional Concrete Canoe Competition
Words and photos by Mia Milosevic
On Sunday, April 13, City College competed in the Metropolitan area regional ASCE Concrete Canoe competition, held at Cook’s Pond in Denville, New Jersey. This quirky competition involves a team of collegiate engineers building a canoe entirely out of concrete, and then racing said canoe against other competing schools.
The CCNY team, engineering students from the Grove School of Engineering, came in third, behind long-standing champions NYU, who placed first, and recent up-and-comers Fairleigh Dickinson University, coming in at second.
“Us in third place?That's really good,” said Jan Kazimierczuk, a civil engineer and senior advisorto the concrete canoe club. “NYU did amazing, and Fairleigh DickinsonUniversity, this is their second time placing second, they’re one to watch outfor.”
In case you haven’theard of it, Concrete Canoe is a well-known civilengineering competition. The students some together at the start of eachacademic year, and then work together over the course of the year, to build acanoe out of concrete. The students also construct supplementary materials,such as the canoe stands, concrete cylinders, and a display table to housethese materials. Lastly, they are tasked with writing up an academic report onthe process.
In February of 2019,the Concrete Canoe teammates came together for Casting Day, where they made thecanoe over the course of a grueling 10 hours.
“We only really getone shot at building the canoe. If something goes wrong, we can’t add on to itlater,” claims Jack Bauman, the team's construction captain. “And then we haveto wait a whole month to see if we did a good job, so that’s fun!” the studentjokes.
The team had faced amyriad of unexpected issues, such as a lack of manpower in preparation for thebig day, a lack of funding, as well as unexpected changes to the exective board.
“We were scrambling last minute,” claims Famutimi. “The president stepped down, and that could [have] really hurt us going forward.”
Despite the array ofproblems and setbacks, the team made it out to Denville ready and with theircanoe in one piece, which is more than could be said for some of the otherteams.
The day consisted of an inspection of thecanoe and supplementary materials, along with 3 different races. The team didexceptionally well with the design aspect of the competition, but struggled topaddle against the cold winds. Even though they did poorly in the races, they placedthird - much to their surprise.
“I’m shocked, I didn’t think we wouldplace at all,” said Elaine Famutimi, the club president.
Despite not gettingfirst place, the team remains optimistic, and they’re already thinking aboutnext year's competition.
“I think we have areally good shot next year,” Kazimierczuk says with great confidence. “If nextyears eboard needs us, needs me or Jeffery or Elaine, we’ll all be around tohelp and we’ll all try to win again next year. As usual.”
