The Ball State team advised by Associate Professor Sherif Attallah from the Construction Management program has made it into the top 4 teams that scored highest points as ranked by the judges’ panels, who is a group of national mechanical contractors. These 4 teams are invited to the annual national convention of MCAA, this year in Hawaii between 15 and 19 March, to present their proposal in front of thousands of representatives of mechanical contractors, usually top positions. The students also get to attend all educational seminars, personal development sessions and the annual vendors’ exhibition where suppliers present their latest technologies for mechanical contractors.

The Mechanical Contractors Association of America (MCAA) holds an annual competition among the 60+ student chapters across the nation. In this competition, the students receive project documentation including drawings and specs for an actual project that is constructed by one of the member companies and the teams are asked to come up with a proposal to complete the mechanical scope of work including establishing a virtual company, building a project organization team and come up with a full estimate, detailed schedule, logistics plan, value engineering ideas, and some system design plans, among other technical and financial deliverables. The teams spend 3 months of the fall semester working on the proposal and interacting with mechanical contractors and vendors to come up with a realistic proposal addressing the challenges that the actual contractor of the project through at them. The proposal, the RFIs, the submittals are all done through the Procore project management system.