Steel Resolve: NJIT Students Take on Bridge Engineering
A bolt bounced off the floor and echoed throughout the makeshift construction zone erected in NJIT's Central King Building. The former theater hall has been repurposed into an engineering playpen, and sitting front-and-center is a 20-foot long bridge — and a cadre of frenetic undergraduates racing against a stopwatch to finish the build.
"That's a deduction," said Thomas Hickey, the faculty advisor and former two-time student captain holding a stopwatch and click counter. A few more bolts wandered away from the bridge. A couple more clicks of the counter.
Fortunately, this was just a practice run and students were getting their first taste of the merciless atmosphere as they prepared for the Steel Bridge Competition. The goal of the game is simple: Design and construct a steel bridge at a 1/10 scale according to a rule set provided by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).
The organizers do well to scale down restrictions and obstacles for bridge building. How teams overcome these challenges to build their bridge to completion will determine their score. It’s not just how fast you can build the bridge, but structural efficiency and construction economy are judged. Also considered is the bridge weight, the number of the builders used to construct the bridge and the deflection incurred from the 2,500-pound load applied.
The ideal bridge is a lightweight yet strong structure that can be assembled quickly and with as few team members as possible.
Just like on a real jobsite, teams are limited by area, environmental factors (like unstable river beds), personnel and, ultimately, cost.
Back in CKB’s playpen, these restrictions are marked out by tape on the floor. Some students are “barges” who are allowed to move in the “water” area. Some are assemblers with impact drivers and drills swinging from their utility belt. After walking around the bridge and picking up the fallen bolts, Hickey explained to one of the first-time builders that they needed to use the flex head socket, allowing for 15 degrees of offset, in order to properly secure the truss to the span. All part of the learning process and learning the tight tolerances required for success.
Bruna Wuitik ’26, a civil engineering major, calls out for a reset to go again. She was surprised when last year’s captains asked her to help lead this year’s steel bridge team. At first, she declined, but reconsidered after some rumination. “In the summer, when they were doing interviews to find captains, I just thought, ‘Hey, you know, why not?’” she said. “I interviewed for the position. I got to be captain, and I think it was the best decision I made.”
Wuitik started out on last year’s team as a builder, attending regular tryouts and practice rotations, ultimately earning a role as a substitute runner — a role that strategically brings parts, pieces and bridge spans to assemblers in the build area. She returned this year to take on one of the most demanding leadership roles on campus managing constructability, practice sessions and delegation of responsibilities among her co-captains: Elijah Ortiz, who led design, and Enzo Suarez, who oversaw fabrication.
Wuitik says her hands-on experience helped her learn to balance work, school and team responsibilities — a skill set she’s already put to use in internships at Neglia Group and Skanska Koch. “It gave me an insight as to what I would be working with in the future if I were to be a project manager,” she said. “I got interviews with various large companies because of the position I hold.”
That experience also informed her focus this year: building a bridge that could be constructed quickly, with improved stability through a new superstructure design that aimed to increase the overall structural stiffness. More on the superstructure later.
It gave me an insight as to what I would be working with in the future.
For civil engineering major Enzo Suarez, the Steel Bridge team has been more than a club — it’s been a proving ground. “I had seen the open houses of the bridge, and I was like, ‘This project is awesome — let me get a piece of that,’” he recalled. He joined as a freshman, quickly found a home in the machine shop, and never left. Now a senior, Suarez serves as one of the team’s three co-captains and led fabrication.
Over the last few years, he’s seen the team transform. What was once a cozy crew of four has grown into a multidisciplinary powerhouse of more than 30 students — spanning multiple class years and skill levels. “This year was very difficult compared to years past,” Suarez said. “It was a large responsibility to handle the development of the team as well as the completion of the project.”
That growth demanded new systems. Together with co-captains Wuitik and Elijah Ortiz, Suarez helped structure the season around rotating breakout teams, each cycling through design, fabrication and construction to help members identify areas they felt most comfortable and proficient. They coordinated group training sessions, gave shop access to newcomers and treated communication as a critical skill. “We made sure that weekly meetings were between all the members and kept them engaged,” he said. “It came down to spreading the work and trying to keep everybody involved.”
The payoff? More than a completed bridge. Students got a first-hand look at the real-world complexities of civil engineering: creating and interpreting design specs, staying on schedule, coordinating across trades and keeping calm under pressure. “It’s as close to a jobsite as you can get on campus,” Suarez said. “You see how one missed measurement can mess up the whole assembly.”
Back to the bridge, because this year’s brought new layers of difficulty and complexity. The superstructure was the boldest change yet — a winged truss system introduced to reduce vertical deflection. “We wanted a more efficient bridge and were willing to sacrifice a little construction time to get it,” said Ortiz, co-captain and design lead.
The idea wasn’t just a novelty. It was a calculated move inspired by competition rule changes, lessons from the prior year and plenty of engineering back-and-forth. “We saw that the allowable depth for the interior truss was a lot shorter than last year, so we knew we had to get creative,” said Ortiz.
After sketching the concept in AutoCAD, the team modeled the structure in SAP2000, simulating how different pipe sizes and geometries would perform under load. They tested for member stress and deflection, optimizing for the best balance between weight and stiffness. Once finalized, they sent the plans to their longtime sponsor Acrow Bridge, who supplied the pipe cuts and raw material for fabrication.
But that complexity had a price. The superstructure added time and difficulty to the construction process. “More parts just equals longer build time,” Ortiz said. Still, the team anticipated the tradeoff — and hoped improved structural efficiency would outweigh the cost in minutes.
In the end, not every variable could be predicted. “Some of the pipes buckled under compression,” Ortiz admitted. “It’s something we thought we planned for, but didn’t plan for enough — which happens. That’s part of trying something new.”
While the Highlanders didn’t take home gold, the effort wasn’t wasted. As Ortiz put it, “We will take that experience and build an even better bridge for the team next year.”
