The Beavers Charitable Trust recently donated $25,000 to BYU Engineering to fund scholarships for heavy civil construction students at BYU.
The Beavers is an organization of heavy civil contractors that promotes the heavy civil industry, in part, by providing scholarship money to outstanding schools to help encourage students to pursue industry careers. They were impressed with the BYU’s performance at this year’s Associated Schools of Construction (ASC) competition, where the Cougars took first place in the Rocky Mountain Region, competing with construction-related programs from universities in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming.
Heavy civil construction involves large infrastructure projects, and the ASC competition requires student teams to create schedules, budgets, and risk plans for real-world projects, the same way they would if they were professionals in the industry bidding on the job. Student teams, however, are given the information and required to develop their plans in a single day. This year’s project was the closing out and capping of a large landfill in Hawaii.
The winning team was comprised entirely of BYU Construction Management majors: Team Captain Isaac Bacon, senior; Seth Holyoak, junior; Julia Eisenstat, junior; JD Hadfield, junior; Battsagaan Ilch, senior; Clark Gustafson, junior.
On-campus to meet the students and present the check for the scholarship donation was The Beavers’ executive director, Dave Woods. He was joined by fellow Beavers member, Wilford Clyde, a long-time BYU donor and Chief Executive of the Clyde Companies, and by Dustin Olson, President of WW Clyde. On hand to receive the check and express appreciation for the donation were Norm Jones, Civil & Environmental Engineering Department Chair; Clifton Farnsworth, Associate Professor of Construction & Facilities Management and advisor to the winning team; Jay Christofferson, Professor and Program Coordinator of Construction & Facilities Management; and Michael Jensen, Dean of the College of Engineering.