MSUM Construction Management team wins ASC Student Competition
Students from the MSU Moorhead Construction Management program won the Heavy-Civil Division of the Region IV Associated Schools of Construction (ASC) CM student competition in Nebraska City, Neb., Oct. 23-26. Region IV ASC participants included 31 teams from the seven-state region of Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri.
MSUM’s winning Heavy-Civil team, coached by Scott Seltveit, was within $600,000 of the actual bid of $19.7 million. Team members included Cody Wegner, Steve Meidinger, Paul Nolden, Mitch Egge, Gabriel Nah.
This is MSUM’s second first place finish in five years, competing against large CM programs at Iowa State University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Kansas State University and Missouri State University.
“It feels pretty good to have done so well,” said Cody Wegner, who was the project lead for this year’s team. “Some of the bigger schools have an actual class just to prepare for this competition. We don’t have a class for the competition, but our CM program is one of the best because the professors come from various areas of the construction industry and have 20-plus years of experience.”
Students competed in four divisions: Commercial, Design‐Build, Heavy‐Civil, and Residential. They used real plans and specifications from projects that have already been or are currently under construction. The overall intent was to place students in “real life” project management situations. In an 18‐hour period, they had to schedule, estimate, run cost analyses, and resolve several management issues that arose during the project-planning phase. A panel of judges from the construction industry reviewed and graded the team proposals.
Besides fine-tuning their estimating, scheduling and presentation skills, senior Steve Meidinger enjoyed the camaraderie of working on this intense project. “It replicates the real world experience of being out the field,” he said. He graduates in May and has accepted a job as estimator with Kiewit Energy.
The project scope of work for the Heavy Civil Division included constructing an entire four-lane Interstate bridge adjacent to its final location at Pecos Street and I-70 in Denver, then working with the Colorado Department of Transportation to shut down the I-70 Interstate for 50 hours to demo the old bridge and install the new one. The new bridge had to be jacked up on rollers, moved, and set on pre-poured bridge abutments after the old bridge was taken down. The new bridge weighed several hundred thousand pounds.