ABET Accreditation Survey [PDF]

Participating in the AEI Student competition was one of the best opportunities I have had in my academic career. The complexity of developing a Net Zero high rise while working on a collaborative team working towards a common set of goals, in my opinion is one of the most fulfilling experiences a young professional going into the construction industry can have.

At the beginning of the project our team came together to establish a goal set that aligned with the goals of the project itself but also reflected what we as a team wanted out of the project. This goal set provided the entire team an attitude that we would carry out throughout the design of the building. What this means is that every decision that our team made had to align with the goal set and ultimately our mission statement. Though the goal set, set the tone for our team it still would not take care of the issues we would run into between disciplines. Therefore, as a team we had to constantly discuss the ramifications of the decisions made on all of the different design disciplines. The constant communication of these decisions required every individual on the team to understand what the other disciplines were doing throughout design. When we found the conflicts we would come together to determine solutions and then weigh the benefits and risks of the possible solutions we had determined. The combination of our goal set and the constant leveraging of design decisions is what allowed our team to become truly collaborative.

Individually this experience has taught me a lot about team building and interaction. I have learned that Integrated Project Delivery requires absolute dedication from all parties involved and that Building Information Modeling is a paramount tool to achieve this. As a team I feel we were able to do this successfully and developed a successful building design as a result.