A group of Grand Valley State University students will travel to Texas in November to compete for $3,000 in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) national conference.

Steve Quirk, Matthew Freundl and Caitlyn Hurley worked as a team and took second place in the design competition in March during the ASME 2012 District B regional conference in Toledo, Ohio.

“We’re trying to build the name of Grand Valley engineering,” Quick said.

Wendy Reffeor, a mechanical engineering professor at GVSU, said teams who win first and second place automatically go to the national competition and are fully funded to attend by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

However, Reffeor said anyone who wants to participate in the national competition can, but those who did not place first or second have to fund the trip, themselves. She added not many teams go that are not funded.

“They have to have a good case to improve their performance,” she said.

But GVSU has three other teams that competed at the regional competition and hope to have a shot at nationals. Teammates and GVSU seniors Jacob Hall and Alex Hastings, along with other GVSU engineering teams, are still trying to find funding in order to go to the competition.

Hall and Hastings received third place in the design competition at regionals, where teams could compete in the design, poster, oral, technical or writing divisions.

Hall said they are trying to find funding through GVSU’s School of Engineering, the GVSU ASME student chapter and local West Michigan engineering companies.

“We want to have the ability to network with engineers from around the world [at the national competition],” Hall said, adding that he hopes to make team T-shirts with a West Michigan engineering company’s logo on it.

Hall said he could not disclose which companies he is trying to have sponsor the team at this time.

Although the three other teams are still uncertain about their future in the competition, Reffeor said GVSU’s second place team would go to the nationals even if the other teams cannot find funding.

She said although teams can have as many or as few members as they want, teams usually do not consolidate or change after the regional competition, so the three unfunded teams will not merge with the funded team.

In order to receive the funding, Hall and his teammate will start from the ground up with their design, which they will present to hopeful sponsors.

“We are redesigning to make [the cars] more efficient and reliable,” Hall said.

Reffeor added that for the past three years, GVSU students have been in the top three places during the regional competition.

“I hope students take what they learned from the regional competition and use that to improve their designs so they are even more successful at the national competition,” she said.

GVSU students battled against representatives from a number of other universities at regionals, including the University of Toronto, University of Cincinnati and Saginaw Valley State University.

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