Ion the Prize

April 21, 2018

Ion the Prize

April 11th-14th, I had the opportunity to participate in the Pacific Southwest Conference (PSWC), where I was part of a team that constructed a portable water filtration system using materials accessible in developing countries. The event is hosted by the Associated Society of Civil Engineers, and has a ton of events including Concrete Canoe and Steel Bridge (the two most famous), different sports competitions, Sustainability, Geowall, Surveying, and more engineering fun haha.

This was such a wonderful experience to be apart of. Even though, it was pretty unorganized, it was neat to not only bond further with people in my major, but also meet Civils and get to support my school as it DOMINATED the event.

Here is a short outline of the trip:

Wednesday, April 11th:

Got on the bus at 6:30 am, and rode 11 hours in a vehicle filled with over 100 engineers to Phoenix, Arizona.
Practice our presentation for the water filter
Ate burritos
Cal Poly meeting
Pool
Bed

Thursday, April 12th:

Got to our competition site at 7:45 am
Supposed to start building at 8am, but that got delayed 15 minutes
Built our filter in 13 minutes, not stepping out of the 10'x10' box
Waited 1.5 hours, while people from ASU got the right soil :-)
Poured our water into our filter (this part is interesting because we constructed a siphon in our top bucket because we weren't allowed to use coagulants, which we learned 2 WEEKS before the competition lol, anyways... we poured most of our water in the first few minutes and then waited for the clay to settle, and then poured more water into the bucket so that the flow could be initiated, and the rest of our filter could do its job!)
Ate lunch
Practiced our speech (with our four builders and two alternates because the rules said a minimum of 2 people presenting)
Presented (with all the CP Civils watching!!!) after learning that there was a max of four presenters, so we had to scrambled and kick two people off of the presentation, which was great...... but it's fine because we CRUSHED the presentation and answered the questions SO WELL. That felt really good.
Spaghetti Factory for dinner

Friday, April 13th:

Watched concrete canoe do its thing (Cal Poly always wins first for any Concrete Canoe award because our canoers practice 45 hours a week for their races, and our concretes are so well constructed that they float through the water, which was so cool to see)
Watched volleyball
Watched KanJam
Watched more concrete canoes
Walked to a Mexican restaurant with Sean before meeting all the other ENVES at Safeway

Saturday, April 14th:

Watched surveying
Watched the impromptu event
Watched Geowall (where they built a wall to support an entire box of sand with a paper wall that weighed 20 grams)
Watched Steel Bridge (I wish I could say more about this, but the team likes to keep everything a secret for when they compete at Nationals... believe me I watched with a dropped jaw because I was that impressed)
Got ready for the banquet
Ate some decent food
Won a ton of awards (to the point where people were booing us, which is kind of rude... but in the end, we still walked home with first overall... aka Cal Poly won the entire event point-wise)

Sunday, April 15th:

Boarded the bus at 7am
Bus broke down in Indio (where Coachella is held) for 4 hours...

Anyways, it was a really fun trip and I can't wait for Cal Poly to host it next year! It makes me realize how many awesome Civil and Environmental Engineering opportunities there are and how well-equipt we are by attending such a fantastic university (academically). The only bad part was catching up on school work, while maintaining the current homework, and also studying for midterms... all while having the flu :-) it was a rough week to follow, but I'm better now!

Pictures are attached :)

Also, concerning the caption... Our team name was Ion the Prize because we used an ion exchange resin in our filter to filter our various organic compounds...