Universidad Panamericana Guadalajara Steel Bridge Team: From Lessons to Leadership at Nationals

June 2025

Author: Antonio Juarez

We had a great experience at Nationals! One of our biggest improvements was reducing our bridge cost compared to Regionals—we achieved a total price of $12,983,178.91, placing 22nd out of 43 teams. While we’re proud of that result, we believe we could have done even better. During construction, we faced a couple of unexpected issues with some bolts and nuts, which affected our performance by nearly $2,000,000.

Still, the best part of the event was connecting with other teams, learning about their strategies, and understanding the reasoning behind their structural designs. We gained a lot of insight, which was our main goal. This was our second consecutive year attending Nationals, and both years have taught us something new. We truly believe that with continued effort and growth, we’ll be able to compete for the national title in the near future.

One of the most valuable lessons we learned was the importance of thinking outside the box. When we first received the competition rules in September, we thought it was impossible to build the bridge with only two builders. We focused our structural design on a three-person construction team and limited our thinking around that concept. Unfortunately, we ended up having to build with four.

After going through the event, we realized that success in this competition often comes from creative problem-solving and not being afraid to challenge our initial assumptions. That’s our key takeaway: designing efficient and innovative solutions to complex problems. This mindset shift will definitely shape how we approach future competitions and engineering challenges in general.

In fact, right after the competition ended, we began working on new strategies for next year. From a structural efficiency standpoint, we plan to optimize our material usage, reducing weight without compromising deflection performance.

However, our main focus will be on construction strategy. If we truly want to compete for the top spot, we need to improve our construction process and make it more creative and efficient. We’ve realized that structural design and construction strategy must go hand in hand, and we’re committed to refining both areas to reach our full potential next season.