It is 3 weeks until Mid-Pac, and Berkeley's Steel Bridge team is feeling good about the progress of TyranniCAL, its entry for the regional steel bridge competition, held at San Jose State University on April 20.
The team is finishing up the bridge's fabrication phase. After spring break, it will be all about the team practicing the assembly of TyranniCAL.
Team members work on the bridge's fabrication in the CEE Structures Lab.
Rahman says, "We’re actually ahead of last year when we only had 2 weeks to practice putting ApoCALypse together.”
(Below is the 2012 Steel Bridge team assembling ApoCALypse at Nationals, where they took first place.)
About 30 students make up this year’s bridge team. Most are CEE undergraduates, but there is also one chemical engineer. The team’s best welder is a biology major.
It is traditional for bridge teams around the country to monitor what their competitors are doing. Over the summer, project managers text each other as they anxiously wait for design specifications to be released. There are blogs on bridge design. Rahman checks in on several regularly.
Although competition is strong among bridge teams, the communal spirit is equally strong.
"The ‘human element’ is the great thing about Bridge,” says Rahman. “Everything is very communal. We’ve all studied other schools’ bridges from the past. Then during the competition, when all the bridges are displayed for aesthetics judging, we walk around and check out each other’s bridges. We continuously learn from each other.”
After a while, all the bridges can start to look the same as a result of all this give and take. “It is like we are all moving towards one ultimate bridge design,” says Rahman.
But then, there is always something that your bridge has that the others don’t.
And that is what Berkeley is counting on to give them the edge.