From November 7th to 11th, the “12th National College Student Structure Design Competition”, which is known as the “Olympic Games” of civil engineering disciplines, was held at South China University of Technology. The team from NEFU won the “National First Prize” (the fifth in the country) and won the “Excellent Organization Award”, our best results since the competition began.

More than 2000 teams from 543 colleges and universities across the country participated in the competition. After the selection of provincial (city) competitions, nearly 700 teachers and students from 107 universities in 30 provinces, municipalities, autonomous regions and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong University) participated in the national competition. The competition is based on the background of many magnificent and characteristic large-span buildings that are currently appearing, and based on the topic of “design and manufacture of large-span spatial structure models subjected to multi-load conditions”. Students are required to perform force analysis, model making and testing on spatial structures under various load conditions such as static load, random selection load and moving load. In the actual structural design, these three load cases correspond to the constant loads, live load, and horizontal loads in the direction of change (such as wind loads or seismic loads). Wang Heran, a 2015 architectural engineering student from the College of Civil Engineering, Zhang Cheng, a 2016 architectural engineering student, and Tan Songyuan, a 2016 traffic civil engineering student, together won the “National First Prize” (the fifth in the country) as a team after 18 hours of model production, 4 hours of model installation and loading. Northeast Forestry University won the “Excellent Organization Award”.

The “National College Student Structure Design Competition” is one of the nine discipline competitions approved by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Finance. The competition is co-sponsored by the Engineering Education Professional Committee of the Chinese Higher Education Institute, the Steering Committee of Civil Engineering of the Higher Education Institution, the Education Working Committee of the China Civil Engineering Society, and the Department of Environment and Civil Engineering of the Science and Technology Committee of the Ministry of Education, and is hosted by universities by turns. It is the highest level competition in civil engineering disciplines which can cultivate college students’ innovative spirit, team cooperation and ability to control time. It aims to improve the innovative design ability, practical ability and comprehensive quality of college students, and further strengthen exchanges and cooperation between universities. From 2005 to 2017, the National College Student Structure Competition has been held for a total of 11 sessions.

The competition reflects the improvement of the quality of civil engineering professionals in Northeast Forestry University. It demonstrates the innovative thinking ability and professional practice ability of NEFU students, strengthens their teamwork awareness, and creates a good academic atmosphere among the students. At the same time, it also promoted the exchanges and learning between teachers and students of NEFU and teachers and students of similar institutions across the country. The excellent performance of the structure design team of NEFU also laid a good foundation both for NEFU to undertake the 13th National College Student Structure Design Competition (Heilongjiang Province Divisional Competition) in 2019 and for the selection of the national competition in the future.