NJIT Students Attend ICRI Event

Tonight, Wednesday February 2, CIM Students have attended the ICRI Metro NY Chapter’s Dinner in Manhattan, NY and received their scholarship awards. ICRI Metro NY was pleased to announce the recipients of the 2011 scholarships:

• Wilton Arellano
• Eric Miller
• Christopher Klemensowicz
• Antonio Gallotta

ICRI Metro NY Chapter was very excited to be able to offer CIM students this scholarship and was looking forward to becoming more involved with the CIM program at NJIT. CIM students have also attended a presentation titled “Preservation of Historic Concrete Structures in the United Kingdom: Lessons From Over The Pond” which was presented by John Fidler, Staff Consultant with Simson Gumpertz & Heger.

I would like to thank the president of ICRI Metro NY Chapter, Alex Somohano who was so happy to see our students and he invited them to be student members in ICRI Metro NY Chapter. I would like also to thank Elena Danke who is always doing her best to help CIM students and program.

NJIT to Host Annual Wine Dinner in Manhattan

We already have close to 90 attendees for the Concrete Industry Management (CIM) Wine Dinner in NYC....Don't miss your chance to attend this fabulous event!

The Annual NECIM Wine Tasting Dinner at Valbella Ristorante in Manhattan.  This is a phenomenal event with delicious food & wine.  The proceeds benefit and fund scholarships for students in the Concrete Industry Management program at NJIT 


Exclusive Dinner & Wine Tasting
Valbella Restaurant
421 West 13th Street
Manhattan


Saturday, February 26, 2011
7 pm Cocktails / 8 pm Dinner
 
In order to give Valbella Restaurant ample time to prepare our dinner and pairing of wines, kindly RSVP by February 20th, so that we can have an accurate headcount.
 
Please call Katie Gibbs 609-267-3432 with any questions or to RSVP.
 
Responses can be sent to:
NECIM Wine Dinner
222 West State St. , Suite 302
Trenton NJ 08608
   

CIM Annual Report Released

The Executive Director of the National Steering Committee (NSC) Eugene Martineau announces the release of the 2009-2010 Annual Report for the Concrete Industry  Management (CIM) program.

The 2009-2010 CIM Annual Report includes:

• Reports from all committees (Education, Marketing/Public Relations, Auction, Recruitment, Finance and Long Range Planning)
• Institutional reports from all five CIM programs
• Industry Patron profiles
• Profiles of CIM Faculty
• Profiles of CIM Graduates
• Executive Board member profiles

AGC: More Firms Plan to Hire in 2011

More construction firms are planning to hire workers this year than are planning to make layoffs,
according to the results of an industry-wide survey released today by the Associated General Contractors of
America and Navigant. The survey, conducted as part of the Construction Industry Hiring and Business
Outlook, shows the industry may finally be emerging from a severe downturn that has left millions of skilled
workers unemployed.

“This won’t be an easy year for most firms, but it will be better than last year,” said Stephen E. Sandherr,
the association’s chief executive officer. “If current trends continue, this industry will be in a much better
position 12 months from now than it is today.”

Read More

CIM Featured in December Issue of Concrete Decor Magazine

 
Historic "puppy stairs " at Alcatraz Island in California. CIM students participated in a renovation project there last summer. | Photo courtesy of Dr. Tanya Komas
 
There's a lot to admire in the seat-of-the-pants way many of the concrete industry's leading decorative concrete pros have learned the art by picking up a book or looking over someone's shoulder, then convincing trusting family and friends to give them enough work to serve as a basis for a portfolio.

But there's also much to be said for a four-year, industry-supported multidisciplinary university program that teaches decorative concrete as part of a hands-on, degree-driven course of studies emphasizing the technology, artistry and business of concrete.

Josh Cornwall, a 2003 Concrete Industry Management graduate, works on a decorative concrete project on the Middle Tennesee State University campus in fall 2009. He is etching the pattern of the MTSU logo, which was later stained. The project was a collaboration between members of the ASCC Decorative Concrete Council and the MTSU CIM Program. | Photo by Becky Linville

MTSU student Rhett Bass visits Alcatraz to lend his skills to the California State University, Chico CIM Program’s restoration efforts. | Photo courtesy of Dr. Kanya Thomas

That's the appeal of the Concrete Industry Management (CIM) Program sponsored by the industry and currently offered through five universities in America. Under the CIM Program, schools offer bachelor's degrees from their schools of engineering along with minors in business administration from the business schools. The business degree includes coursework in accounting, project management, marketing and related subjects.

Two of the schools - California State University, Chico (CSU Chico) and Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) - include decorative concrete as an elective to core courses that provide grounding in concrete contracting, engineering, sales, project and production management and new technologies.

"We've had great success in the five years we've been with the program, " says Dr. Tanya Komas, director of the CIM Program at Chico State. "We graduated 14 students last year and all of them are employed. "

That claim is particularly noteworthy in this economy, and a trend in which Clark Branum takes special pride. Branum, a nationally known decorative concrete expert, is a visiting lecturer for the Chico State program. "We're an aging breed, so to speak, " he says. "When you bring in young people and train them properly, it's a major advantage to the industry. "

A decorative concrete course
MTSU was the pioneering school within the CIM Program, having started in 1996. But it's more recently, within only the last three years, that decorative concrete has been offered as an elective to students within the program, and initially only at Chico State.

"That's a great example of how key leaders were able to see an emerging market and a need within the industry and build a curriculum and craft a program that responds to those needs and opportunities, " states Brian Gallagher, a national steering committee member of CIM and chairman of the CIM marketing committee. "They were also able to tap into local contractors and other industry resources to get their expertise into the classroom. "

As decorative concrete tends to be an entrepreneurial, self-starting kind of a career choice, that's exactly how the Chico State team put their course together. "The students wanted it, so we we engaged a number of top industry professionals and learned it together, " says Komas. "I worked with Clark, the real expert in this area, to see what a university-based decorative concrete curriculum would look like, how the flow of the lectures and accompanying hands-on lab exercises should work. "

The course's first "textbook " was - and still is, for now - basically a collection of lesson plans, a manual that's grown as the class has taken shape on the bones of what's worked so far.

Dr. Heather Brown, Komas' counterpart at MTSU, picked up the decorative concrete class after that first year at Chico. As at the California school, MTSU students learn by doing.

"The students love being able to roll up their sleeves and learn concrete hands-on. They request fieldwork experiences to gain better insight into all aspects of construction, " Brown says.

Partnering with industry
The decorative concrete course is a 15-week semester-long program that involves classroom instruction and hands-on lab exercises every week on such topics as stamping, staining, texturing, project planning, sustainable aspects of decorative concrete, specialty applications and other pertinent subject areas.

Outside experts are brought in to present the material first - then the students put into practice what they've learned in the classroom.

During the class, students get to take their lessons into the real world and see the creative, technical and business aspects of the decorative concrete industry. "One student made a concrete guitar stand, another did work in fiber optics, " says Brown.

Branum sees the benefits of the program from an industry perspective. "The hardest part of hiring is finding young people you don't have to train from the ground up, " he observes.

To the decorative concrete industry, that's the number one reason to embrace the CIM Program.
 

CIM students work to restore Alcatraz As undoubtedly the most colorful and memorable element of the U.S. National Park Service, the infamous Alcatraz Island gets more than a million visitors a year, and it shows. As a former military prison, federal penitentiary, bird sanctuary and, much more recently, a popular tourist destination within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, The Rock's concrete walkways, railings and other structures are weathered and badly in need of stabilization and repair. "The 150-year-old military structures beneath the existing Prison Recreation Yard, the tops of which we exposed during slab repair work in cooperation with NPS archaeologists, have what could be some of the very earliest concrete in the United States, " says Dr. Tanya Komas. Her concrete repair and decorative concrete students in the CIM Program at California State University, Chico got the call to spend last summer making repairs. Working under the watchful eye of NPS staff, archeologists (interested in the below-ground structures) and biologists (safeguarding the bird population), Komas' students painstakingly patched and repaired concrete a century old. The goal was to match as perfectly as possible the existing concrete work within the old prison rec yard and concrete stairs that are part of the old officers' row. "The students started with mock-ups to decide on the best approach, then either formed and poured or hand-placed the repair material. As soon as the material would allow, they used decorative techniques to rough it up and scar it, " Komas recalls. Her group used three different kinds of materials from BASF to accomplish structurally successful repairs as well as formulate concrete coloration and textures that replicated the shades brought about by decades of moss growth and bird droppings, the rough textural conditions incurred by the harsh weather, and the effects of millions of hands and feet. "The company's Zero-C mixes perfectly matched what we were doing, " says Komas. "We shaped the Vertical Overhead Mortar mix like Play-Doh for hand placement in vertical applications, which was quickly followed by scratching and scarring to match the historic textures. We used the self-consolidating mix with wood forms in other places. The students devised a very creative method of texturizing the interior surfaces of their forms to match the historic texture in these cases. "To achieve color matching, we dabbed on white and tinted microtoppings and an overall subtle application of color-matched water-based ecofriendly stains. All the while, we worked among the tourists and sea gulls. " Bureaucracy was as much a working challenge as the environment. "Operating under Secretary of the Interior guidelines, we had to be very minimalist in what we took out. It was a situation where standard practices didn't always apply, and that was a valuable lesson to students, " says Komas. "What they learned, " says Clark Branum, "was to do structural repair properly with a blend of artistry and concrete. "

PreiTech Corp. owner and project instructor Mike Eastergard helps CIM students construct a Sept. 11 memorial at 2010 World of Concrete. | Photos by Becky Marshall A 9/11 tribute at WOC A memorable fieldwork project took top senior CIM students at MTSU and CSU Chico to World of Concrete in Las Vegas last February. Under the tutelage of Ed Gruetzner, a decorative concrete practitioner who's also a retired firefighter from New York City, and Michael Eastergard, owner of PreiTech Corp., a concrete form company, students from both MTSU and Chico State created a bittersweet memorial to members of two companies of firefighters who were lost at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. "It was touching, listening to the fire-station chief talking about the firefighters he'd lost on 9/11, " says Dr. Heather Brown, of MTSU's CIM Program. "The students were so proud to be involved. " The team created concrete silhouettes of two towers ranging to nearly 10 feet tall. (A two-inch height difference between towers mimics the effect of perspective.) Glass-fiber reinforced concrete was cast against faceted casting mats to produce a dramatic reflective mirrored finish. Onto that finish was engraved the names of the fallen heroes and the story behind the event. Unique casting mats were created for the project by Eastergard. The CIM students who worked on the project were seniors. "It was an entirely extracurricular undertaking for a select group of students, " says Dr. Tanya Komas, CIM Program, CSU Chico. "They'd taken the decorative class, so they had some knowledge of the process, but they still had to learn how to do GFRC. " Students practiced with samples of the GFRC panels before the show, then spent their in-show time erecting forms, fitting them together and sanding them, reports Brown. The memorial was erected, displayed and then dismantled all under the keen observation of show attendees. It will be reinstalled and officially dedicated at a memorial park in New York across the street from one of the firehouses affected. reports Brown.

Universities offering CIM degrees California State University, Chico www.csuchico.edu/cim Middle Tennessee State University www.mtsu.edu/~concrete New Jersey Institute of Technology engineeringtech.njit.edu/academics/cim.php Texas State University, San Marcos www.txstate.edu Arizona State University www.cimasu.org Concrete Industry Management Program Home Page www.concretedegree.com

CIM Raises More Than $500,000 at Annual Auction

The National Steering Committee (NSC) for the Concrete Industry Management (CIM) program – a business intensive program that awards students with a four-year Bachelor of Science degree in Concrete Industry Management – raised more than $500,000 in gross revenue at its sixth annual auction, held in conjunction with the World of Concrete on Thursday, Jan. 20. 

According to Brian Gallagher, Chairman of the Marketing Committee for the NSC, this year’s auction totals are nearly $120,000 more than the 2010 event. “The attendance at the auction was greater than ever before – both on-site and online. The expanded participation this year from internet bidders was a key as we sold $97,000 worth of items through online bidding.”

The signature item this year was a Mack Truck model GU713 equipped with a McNeilus 11-cubic-yard Bridgemaster® concrete mixer donated by Mack Trucks, Inc. and McNeilus Companies, Inc. The winning bidder of the mixer truck was San Benito Supply from Northern California.

“We are thrilled how everyone stepped up to donate and bid on the great auction items and support the CIM program,” commented Eugene Martineau, Executive Director of the NSC. “The money raised will benefit the National Steering Committee and support the current CIM program as well as help fund future program expansion.”

“Thanks to the incredible support of the event from the World of Concrete (WOC) Show Management, Hanley Wood Publications, McNeilus Companies, Inc., Mack Trucks, Inc., and Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, the auction was a complete success,” said Martineau.   

In addition to the live auction, a silent auction was also held. Auction items included cement, a skid steer, concrete saws, drills, mixers,  vibrators, scaffolding, safety equipment, screeds, fiber transport systems, dust collectors, NDT equipment, decorative concrete tools, water meters, pumps, generators, training sessions, reference books, advertisements, laptop computers, sports memorabilia, sports travel packages, golf school packages, and vacation travel packages.


Media Coverage


Concrete Construction
ConcreteExecutive.com
ForConstructionPros.com

MTSU Students Give Back!

MTSU CIM students participated in volunteer work with Volunteers of America (VOA). Early in the semester the CIM program met with representatives of VOA to discuss how our program could assist their clients. VOA is a privately-funded social services agency that addresses many areas for those who need a helping hand. One of the services they provide is finding affordable housing to put clients back on their feet and to provide stability for clients with physical or mental challenges. Several of those clients have been placed in houses in need of a sidewalk or driveway. With that in mind, the MTSU CIM program is partnering with VOA to help with some of these needs.

In our first project, we provided a new driveway for two VOA clients living in Murfreesboro and we are looking forward to other projects that will follow. This is a great opportunity for students to participate in hands-on work and to see how such relatively small acts can impact someone's life.

The MTSU AGC student chapter is also volunteering with Habitat for Humanity to provide whatever services are needed - whether it is concrete-related or just hammering nails! More information will follow on our service projects!