In October, the TAMU student chapter of SEAoT was very active, holding 4 events: two general meetings, Game Night and Open House.
On October 7th, we hosted Ardalan Mosavi and Tim Zhou from Arup. Ardalan talked about the critical and interesting projects in Arup and how diverse and inclusive were the duties of Arup to complete those projects. Some of the projects he talked about are:
- Presenting photos of the Harbor Bridge of Corpus Christi along with briefly discussing the steps to complete the project.
- Presenting the Commonwealth LNG liquefaction and export facility in Louisiana and challenges along the way to construction.
- Presenting the Jansen Potash mine and Arup’s role on production and service of two mining shafts.
- Presenting the Great Lake Tunnel Project (GLTP), a natural gas liquids pipeline in Michigan, through an interesting video.
- Describing an interesting cloud-based data-driven asset management strategy developed by Arup engineers.
We had roughly 20 participants who found the session interesting and informative.
On October 14th, we had a fun program to gather students together to have fun and play games along with socializing and enjoying free pizza. On our game night, we had around 40 participants.
On October 21st, we hosted Emily Miller from OTHON Engineering. Emily explained about the different parts of the company, projects, and camaraderie. Then she discussed a design build project from contract to closure; the SH99 Grand Parkway Segment. Emily presented the project development timeline and reference documents including instructions to proposers, drainage report, geotechnical report, design-build agreement with exhibits, etc. She then explained the RFQ and RFP documents, design reference documents, and the programs used along with the project development. There were many design considerations, some of which were the environmental approval, culverts, drainage, roadway alignments, geometry, hazardous materials, to name but a few. Among such considerations, drainage, geotechnical, and railroad issues were discussed. Aesthetic concepts were also important for the construction. She then discussed the tender design phase including updating the schematic to be compliant with applicable resources and improving it upon the requirements. Then she presented some of the details on the design of the segment. This project will be open to traffic by September 2022. We had about 20 attendees in this session.
On October 28th, we held a session for students who are interested in structural engineering or wanted to learn about it. We had an Open House session in which different areas of structural engineering were covered by different PhD and Master students in Structural Engineering. Students joined us and learned more about structural engineering and asked their questions and concerns. In this event, we had about 20 participants.
Photos of each event are attached to this post.
Best Regards,
Mohammad Aghajani