On July 17th 2015, the First National College Geotechnical Engineering Competition was held in Shanghai Jiaotong University. Prof. ZHENG Junjie from the Department of Road and Bridge Engineering of HUST led a team in this competition. The team consisted of three members, namely Lv Siqi, Xue Pengpeng (undergraduate students majoring in Civil Engineering from 2011) and Cao Wenzhao (a doctoral candidate who started his study in 2012). With their total score ranking the second, the team won the first class prize in this competition with their works named “Three Pillars”.

With Committee for Education and Instruction of Civil Engineering in Colleges and Universities and China Civil Engineering Society (CCES) as the organizer, Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering Division of CCES and Shanghai Jiaotong University as co-organizers, this competition is the first national competition of geotechnical engineering for undergraduate students. It is aimed to motivate the innovation of young students, arouse their interests in geotechnical engineering and related disciplines, and promote the communication between students from different universities.

With the theme of building a retaining wall model, the competition attracts 21 teams from 21 universities, which have been evaluated as excellent by Civil Engineering experts. The content of this competition included designing, modeling and testing. Finally, 16 teams from Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Tongji University, Southeast University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology and other universities passed the initial evaluation and reached the final competition. With Prof. LI Guangxin, a well-known expert in geotechnical engineering and professor of Tsinghua University as the director of the judging panel, Yin Zongze, professor of Hohai University, ZHANG Bingyin, director of Committee for Education and Instruction of Soil Mechanics and professor of Tsinghua University, WANG Jianhua, the chairman of the organizing committee and professor of Shanghai Jiaotong University, and SUN De’an, Dean of Shanghai University acted as judges for the final competition and gave their comments at the scene.