By: Jon Wall, EIT; ASCE EWRI Pittsburgh Chairperson Elect
Each year, ASCE hosts a nationwide student symposium, split into geographical regions, for undergraduate student chapters to showcase their designing and building skills and achievements. The symposia include several competitions such as concrete canoe, steel bridge, surveying, and more. The 2026 Mid-Atlantic Student Symposium was held at the University of Pittsburgh Johnstown in April. The Mid-Atlantic region is comprised of 31 student chapters within Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Washington DC.
Among the competitions of this year, ASCE chose to make the Sustainable Solutions Competition (SSC) based on a rapidly expanding industry - AI infrastructure. Teams of each university had to come up with a design and proposal for a sustainable data center focusing on key aspects such as the cooling system, site resiliency, and earning a level of trust with the community. Data center projects inherently have trouble meeting expectations on all three of those fronts.
The project teams had to claim and justify sustainability credits as defined by Envision - a green certification framework through the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, to prove their design is sustainable, resilient, and equitable. In total, participating student chapters had to create and submit a design proposal, an Envision justification report, a poster display, and a 3D model of their data center site in SketchUp and conduct an in-person presentation and interview of their project at the symposium. This year's Mid-Atlantic SSC saw 14 student chapters compete, with many of those schools participating for the first time in this specific competition. The participating schools included:
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Catholic University of America
- George Mason University
- George Washington University
- Howard University
- Johns Hopkins University
- Morgan State University
- Pennsylvania State University - State College
- Pennsylvania State University - Harrisburg
- Slippery Rock University
- Swarthmore College
- University of Maryland
- University of Pittsburgh - Oakland
- York College of Pennsylvania
Two Pittsburgh EWRI members volunteered to judge the competition this year: Jon Wall and Alex Demko. Alex was also in charge of the competition as head judge, organizing the judges and helping run the in-person competition activities.
"It was incredible to see the work that these students were able to accomplish in just a few months. Most of the students did not have classes to help give them the background they needed to design some of the system components. They had to conduct research on their own and figure out how to piece it all together to make a comprehensive and cohesive data center design. Every single school did an amazing job, with some accomplishing a final design that blew all my expectations. I am excited to see these students move into their careers after school and continue pushing our industry forward in a sustainable way." - Alex Demko
"I was under the impression that the data center design problem was deliberately laid out with two characteristics in mind – one, data centers are typically far from sustainable, and two, the field has relatively little precedent even by industry standards. Yet, the amount of effort that went into solving these deliberately challenging design problems as an undergrad without benefitting from years’ worth of institutional memory or company resources is a feat on its own, but you also ought to take account the fact that this undertaking occurred alongside of the daily routines of semester coursework. This is not a project that directly impacts their GPA and yet many students pushed the envelope of what they thought they could or could not do, and I think that’s going to make some great potential industry leaders for this generation." - Jon Wall
Congratulations to all the participating student chapters and the winning team at Johns Hopkins University! And a sincere thanks to Alex and Jon for dedicating their time to support and promote our future engineers.
Photo: Sustainable Solutions Competition Mid-Atlantic Symposium, judge panel - Alex Demko, Rachel Towler, Shannon Parks, Jon Wall, John Lease, and Hudson Rabenold.
