"Knowing that you can produce and compete with the best minds in the country is a real confidence booster." That’s how Butch Gerbrandt describes the effect of a good showing in the International Environmental Design Contest, sponsored by the Waste-management Education and Research Consortium. The Montana Tech team Gerbrandt sponsors took overall first place honors (and $10,000 in prize money) in the seventh annual design competition, held on New Mexico State University’s Las Cruces campus April 8-11. Founded in 1990 under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy, WERC combines four educational institutions and two national laboratories to address hazardous, radioactive, and solid waste issues. Each year the design contest challenges university teams to solve up to three different actual environmental restoration problems. Competitors produce written, oral, and poster presentations, as well as working, bench-scale demonstrations of their technological innovations. This year’s competition involved nearly 200 students (30 teams from 20 universities) and over 60 judges. The tasks for this year’s competition included deployment of surface sampling equipment in large tanks, treatment of radionuclide-contaminated groundwater, and HEPA filter remediation and disposal. First place honors for each task went to the University of Maryland, Montana Tech, and the University of Idaho, respectively. Total cash prizes exceeded $60,000. Gerbrandt says the contest provides a tremendous education, and former students bear him out. Dave McCarthy, a member of Montana Tech’s 1994 team, points out that research for the contest is less compartmentalized than course work and more realistic: "It was the first time something was at stake, and we had to work together as a team." McCarthy says the experience he gained with heavy metal contamination is applicable to his current work for a petroleum firm, not to mention the coping skills he gained from the give and take of the team effort. Kelly Sturm, one of McCarthy’s teammates, says the skills she gained in preparing the poster session and delivering the oral presentation have been directly applicable to the job she began with a Wyoming mining company shortly after the 1994 contest. Allison Malsam, a member of Montana Tech’s 1995 team now working for a communications firm, echoes McCarthy and Sturm on the professional benefits of design contest participation: "Unlike the classroom, where you know there’s an answer and you can compare your solutions to other people’s, the contest presents real-world problems that have stumped other people, and it takes creativity to succeed. We invested all our energy because we knew only the highest caliber work would win." Former contestants say they are glad to have competition participation on their resumes. It definitely sparked interest in job interviews and gave them a chance to talk about an experience that set them apart from other candidates. In fact, Gerbrandt, whose Montana Tech teams have competed four times, reports, "Over the years, two of our students have actually received job offers at the contest from industry representatives serving as judges!" Susan Masten, faculty sponsor of the Michigan State team, praises the interdisciplinary aspect of the contest’s demands. The students "are forced to deal with legal, regulatory, business plans, health and safety considerations, much of which they do not see elsewhere in their course work." The student-generated solutions are so well designed that several have been implemented at federal and industrial sites throughout the country. Abbas Ghassemi, who directs the contest for WERC, says, "The acceptance of their applications demonstrates the professionalism the students bring to the contest. It also reflects the freshness of their thinking in addressing the world’s most pressing environmental issues." For more information about WERC and future design contests, see the WERC homepage at http://www.nmsu.edu/~werc, call (800) 523-5996, or write WERC, Box 30001, Dept. WERC, Las Cruces, NM 88003-8001.