At the beginning of last semester, none of us had a clear idea of what the senior project would be or how it would have to be performed. Some of the advantages are that at the beginning we all knew each other, and that made this process easier. After the professor explained to us that we had to focus in one of the different specifications of civil engineering; such as environmental, structural, geotechnical or transportation, we all felt more interested in the structural part. After a couple of days later, we contacted a structural engineer to guide us throughout the project, and he has been a very good support and has given us some of the ideas on which we are working on already. The main project that our mentor suggested and being the one in which we are working on consists of an addition of the Dona Ana Community College. We all agreed that this project it would be a good start for all of us to perform an analysis of a building being supervised by a civil engineer with several years of experience on the field.
     Our group decided to base our project on the structural aspect of civil engineering. Professor Tandon suggested getting a mentor, which directed us to Ruben Ponce and his assistant Angel Jimenez. Ruben Ponce is a structural engineer who has his own company located on 2417 Wyoming Ave. Miguel Torres and Angel Morales set up a meeting with him. Although Mr. Ponce gave us a great idea for a project, he told us about a building addition in the Dona Ana County Community College (DACC). The address of the facility is located at 1700 East Ohara Road (Anthony gap) in Anthony New Mexico. With this in mind, we began to realize how beneficial an expansion to the small school like DACC would be.

There are many specifications about the facility that need to be taken into consideration before our group can talk about our design analysis of the building site. The Dona Ana Community College extension facility consists of 8,000 square footage of area. The soil consists of fine grained, which can be a problem because the soil may need more compaction in order to withstand the loads of the building. According to our mentor it will be necessary to compact the soil at a 95% level using a sheep roller. We must further investigate the foundation to analyze the geotechnical side in order to prevent too much consolidation. The main objective was to have a uniform settlement and a constant soil pressure throughout the foundation. The foundation is made of fiber-reinforce concrete to have a minimum cracks and prevent the loss of compressive strength.

Below is the AutoCAD file that we created for our project.