When McCormick junior Shea McHenry looked at colleges, she looked for an unusual characteristic — whether schools had a concrete canoe club.

McHenry is now a project manager of Northwestern’s Concrete Canoe team, an undergraduate club with the annual objective of designing, building and racing a canoe made out of concrete against other teams.

A civil engineering major, McHenry looked to find a club containing skills that appeal to her classes and area of study. After hearing about concrete canoe teams at universities across the nation, the presence of a team became a factor while she considered different schools.

As the project manager of Northwestern’s team, McHenry oversees the process of creating a concrete canoe. Going into the holidays, the team is preparing for a Winter Quarter of executing and building its model, which is more complex than it seems, she said.

“In reality, we’re designing, manufacturing, constructing a canoe that’s raceable against other teams while creating a fully inclusive design report, budget spreadsheet and other presentations to accommodate it,” McHenry said.

Every spring, the Northwestern team takes its canoe to the American Society of Civil Engineers Great Lakes Student Conference. The next conference will be in Madison, Wisconsin in April 2020.

The team will race their canoe against approximately 20 other schools, according to McCormick junior Paty Lohman, the team’s other project manager.

“Sometimes people think it’s really simple, but it truly isn’t,” Lohman said. “If anything, designing a mix of concrete that floats is difficult, but then doing that all by hand from scratch with students is a fun and challenging design project from start to finish.”

McHenry and Lohman say they put in approximately four to seven hours a week into managing the canoe and the team. They hold 30-minute meetings once a week for the whole club, but commitment time increases as the conference approaches.

As the project manager of finance, some of McHenry’s responsibilities include asking for grants and managing the budget for the team’s resources. Lohman is the project manager of communication, so she takes care of scheduling meetings and coordinating with McHenry to order materials needed to construct the canoe.

McHenry said one of the challenges of managing the team is coordinating schedules on top of members’ busy workloads.

“McCormick kids are just really stressed,” McHenry said. “Not everybody’s gonna be in a good spot all through the quarter, so [it’s challenging] to adjust to people’s schedule changes, family conflicts and personal health.”

Besides constructing an efficient canoe, the team also gets to finalize their design’s theme. Last year, the canoe was “Incredibles” themed, with a red exterior and an “N” designed to look like “The Incredibles” logo. This year, the canoe’s theme is “We Canoe It,” a spin on Rosie the Riveter’s “We Can Do It.”

McHenry and Lohman said the theme is relevant, given their leadership as two female project managers in a male-dominated design team, and more generally, in engineering, a male-dominated field.

“When both of us started in these positions, we were picking up the team and having a rebuilding year,” Lohman said. “We’ve been growing with the team. It’s been a pretty good experience. Everyone treats us with respect, and we treat them with respect.”

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @andreabian_