Matthew Crispi is a Civil Engineering student at Tennessee Tech University.  Matthew participated in the ACE Mentor program here in the Nashville area.  Here is an update Matthew sent us:

I got back from ASCE Student Conference in Boca Raton last night and wanted to tell you about the competitions I got to compete in and the projects I’ve been working on here at Tennessee Tech. I joined the ASCE Steel Bridge team and got to fabricate the whole bridge. Our program has struggled for the past couple years, but we feel our design this year was a really strong base model to go off of for the next couple years and we’ve made it our goal to make it to nationals within 2 years. Our build team did a good job in the build competition, but the bridge was disqualified because it failed lateral deflection at the cantilever by about 1/100 of an inch. It was a little disappointing, but we know exactly what to do to fix it and some of our members are planning to stay in Cookeville over summer and do some testing on different ideas.
I also did the theme display competition by myself as a side project, and I won 3rd place for it, which was really exciting. I attached some pictures I took from conference. There should be more professional pictures published and I will send them when I find out when and where they will be posted.
I hope your current ACE project is going well and that you have a great presentation at this year’s banquet. Let all the other mentors know I said hi.