Mike Nolan Members of the winning Wisconsin team give their presentation.

College engineering students spend a lot of time on number crunching and abstract theory, but eight university teams from across the U.S. and Canada recently had the chance to compete to design a solution for a real-world environmental problem. Students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison came away from the May 19 experience with a cash prize of $2,500, after impressing a group of New York City-based judges with their technical prowess and presentation skills.

The sponsor, Metcalf & Eddy, Wakefield, Mass., gave teams a choice of five environmental problems to solve and students had to present what they believed to be the best approach. After viewing a video presentation from each team, M&E selected teams from Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, to come to its New York office and present their designs. M&E engineers, as well as an official from the New York City Dept. of Environmental Protection, judged which team did the best job in presenting an approach for rerouting wastewater for nonpotable usage. The Wisconsin team chose to divert the required amount of water before final clarification and use a sand filter and chlorine disinfection process to make the water usable for landscape and irrigation. Waterloo's solution was similar but judges preferred the Wisconsin-Madison presentation.

The other teams participating were from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Widener University, Chester, Pa.; two from the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Ind.; and two from Iowa State University, Ames.

Teams were charged with not only designing the infrastructure, they were challenged with assessing costs, providing ways to generate public support of wastewater reuse and developing an effective presentation, an exercise that often is unfamiliar for student engineers. "The important part of the project is being able to communicate the proposal," says Jekabs Vittands, president of Metcalf & Eddy of New York, Inc. and a senior vice president of Metcalf & Eddy Inc. "In the past, engineering education has neglected that in the training."

Aaron Ausen, a University of Wisconsin senior, says the project was a great way to wrap up his academic career. "It gives you another aspect of engineering; it ties all our trades together," says the recent graduate. Peter John Thompson, a member of the Waterloo squad, says the project "was a comprehensive process. It's becoming more and more critical for engineers to become multidisciplinary, to look at situations from a variety of perspectives."

Tim Bradley, the M&E vice president working on the actual wastewater reuse project in Cape May County, N.J., outlined the firm's actual design strategy and how it differed from each student team's proposal. But he also provided the two groups with details on how the firm won the project, from initial proposal to a comprehensive case study. "We had to do what you just did," Bradley told the teams. "Our solution is not fundamentally different than the solutions you came up with."

The competition also offered M&E a possible workforce boost. "The origin is for recruiting, to establish a relationship with universities and students," says Ryujiro Tsuchihashi, M&E's technical specialist, who coordinated the contest, now in its fourth year. "It's important for professional organizations and schools to be closer," adds Vittands, who would like to see more schools participate in future competitions.