Top Honours for Civil Engineering Student

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Representing the Programme of Civil Engineering at UKZN, student Ms Iksha Singh was awarded first prize in a SA Institute of Civil Engineering (SAICE) research and investigation competition.

Her entry was titled: “The Carbon Footprint Analysis of Various Construction Materials and Implications for Building Design: A Comparative Study on Hotel Verde”.

Singh’s research was supervised by Dr Elena Friedrich.

The competition was open to all South African universities with accredited civil engineering programmes in which investigative projects, in the form of dissertations, are part of the national curriculum for final year Civil Engineering undergraduate students. 

This year six universities - UKZN, the University of Cape Town, the University of Pretoria, the University of Witwatersrand, the University of Johannesburg and Stellenbosch University - sent their best final year students from the class of 2015 to present their projects to a panel of judges, comprising both selected industry leaders and non-engineers.

Most of the universities were represented by teams of two students and in some institutions dissertation research is scheduled over the entire year (two semesters). At UKZN these projects are individual and scheduled over a single semester.

Sally Frost