Virginia Tech Team Wins Second Prize in NSSGA/SME Student Design Competition

The Student Design Competition was introduced in the fall of 2004 and culminated at the 2005 SME Annual Meeting and Exhibit in Salt Lake City, UT. It is a two-stage competition involving a technical design stage and an oral presentation stage based on an aggregate mining industry design problem. It was felt that combining these two categories of a technical solution and an oral presentation provided the basis for most engineering work once the students enter the mining industry. In this way, the students can be involved in a “real world” engineering problem and solution prior to graduation. The teams are judged on presentation skills, creativity, understanding of aggregate mining processes, and thoughtful methodology.