Mississippi State’s Concrete Canoe Team, which is a part of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), recently attended the ASCE Deep South Conference, located in Lake Charles, Louisiana this year. 
  The ASCE is a national professional society that includes student chapters at every school that has a civil engineering program. The regional conference hosted 15 schools in attendance including Ole Miss, LSU, Arkansas State and others. The conference hosts many competitions, consisting of the concrete canoe competition, the steel bridge competition, the surveying competition and the Daniel Mead paper competition. The first place winners from each of these competitions are invited to Nationals, which will be held in Tyler, Texas this year. 
 “The Concrete Canoe Competition requires skills such as research and development of the canoe design, as well as the concrete mix design, which must have a density lower than water,” Corbin Coker, senior, student member of the ASCE and civil and environmental engineering major, said in an email, “Other categories consist of the technical design paper, the professional presentation and concluding with racing with the canoe. The skills necessary vary from highly academic and research intensive to exceptionally athletic, in which many schools recruit athletes from padding teams and other programs.”
   Coker said a the competition is judged by a team of professionals, and each catagory accounts for 25 percent of the overall score.
  MSU received first place in the final product (canoe design, aesthetics, etc.), the professional presentation and the technical paper.
  “The mixed design is themed after the concrete mix for Davis Wade Stadium, the new addition to the north end zone,” Coker said. 
 Coker said time management was learned by the student members through the Deep South Conference along with strategic processes utilized in multiple competitions, including the steel bridge competition, the concrete bowling competition and the land surveying competition.
 
Coker described his favorite part of being on the team and how he wishes to see the program continue to grow and change in the future.
  “My favorite part is really the interaction with different people from different backgrounds trying to accomplish the same tasks, which is putting out the best product that we can, which would be the canoe,” Coker said. “That’s something in larger groups, with 15 plus people, is easier said than done, but I think that our chapter of ASCE has really grasped a hold of how to manage that and to put a product out that stands ahead of all of the other competitors that we’re going against. We really received a lot of praise from the judges and even other teams that were at conference competing against us.” 
      Joseph Arthur, senior civil and environmental major, who was also on the team last year, helped get things started for the competition.
  “It’s definitely nice being a part of a team that comes together and does something with a goal and succeeds in that goal,” Arthur said.