Our Design Build Institute of America (DBIA) student chapter pulled out all the stops, scrambling in one short week to submit a 30 page SOQ (Statement of Qualifications) for a theoretical Design-Build project entry for their region’s DBIA student competition. Despite the short timeline our UMKC team, Design-Build Performance Partners, won first place with a total of 1,906 points at the regional competition. They were awarded $1000 and free registration to attend the national competition in New Orleans on November 7th, 8th, and 9th.

The project was to design a performing arts center on a university campus in Oklahoma following various guidelines outlined in the RFQ. The guidelines included things such as an overall strategy about how we were going to go about the project, adjacency diagrams, initial cost estimate, organizational breakdown, etc. The team only had a week to complete and submit the SOQ from the time the RFQ was first issued. The design-build project delivery method is different from the traditional Design-Bid-Build delivery method and this competition was orchestrated to test the UMKC DBIA team’s knowledge and understanding of these differences.

SCE congratulates DBIA team members, Amanda “Mandy” Leipard – Civil Engineering undergrad; Joshua Boehm – Urban Planning & Design, Economics undergrad, and Erwin Quintanilla – Civil Engineering graduate student and team captain, Sean Rivers – Civil Engineering undergrad. SCE civil engineering undergrad Andrew “Andy” O’Laughlin provided additional help. Chuck Williams and Dr. Ceki Halmen are the team’s faculty advisors