Chapter SDCUTCN2019

If you got here, I probably caught your attention, which makes me very happy because our journey has just begun. I will take you back in time and travel today to Vancouver (CANADA), in 2019. The story I am about to tell you is full of adventures, be prepared. If you are impatient do not worry, this story has a happy ending!

GABRIELA PETRUȚ is the leader of the SDC2019 team. It would have been my pleasure to describe Gabriela myself, but it is more appropriate to hear the opinion of her team "she is a soulful person. She is indeed organized and attentive to detail, but the fact that she puts so much soul into everything she does is her greatest asset. Maybe sometimes she thinks this is a weakness because she cares too much about some aspects. My opinion is that she puts soul and passion in everything that she does and few people can say that about themselves ”(COSMIN CHIRILIANU).

The 2019 members include the following members: Ligia LUPAESCU, Andrei SZILAGHI, Cosmin CHIRILIANU, Norbert DEAC, Bogdan PETRUȚ, Romana BENEA, Bogdan ALBU, Zsolt GEDŐ, Elöd NAGY, Örs NAGY, Béla BÁCS.

I tell you every time we meet about the benefits that such a contest can bring you, but it is much more than that. For each participant is different, the impact is more than my words can describe! This contest brought Gabriela a second family, the "office community", made up of "dear people who are now very important" to her. And yet you, the reader, what would you like to discover if you participated in Seismic Design? Until you have an answer, I want to tell you a secret, I think Gabriela will help me too: participating in a contest (such as Seismic Design) “helps you discover some latent superpowers, which have always been with you but you didn't know they existed. " If you are an introvert, I want you to imagine the following: before SDC Gabriela tells us that “I was the person who avoided ordering pizza on the phone. Public speaking was not something for me, or so I thought. " Also Gabriela, this shy young woman was the presenter of the SDC2019 team and impressed the world internationally.

All generations have something special, representative. In 2019, the team was formed by “the fourth civil year, architects and Ligia, the little girl we adopted” (Ligia was a second-year student at the first participation). But what do you think is the recipe for success here? Gabriela shared her edition with us, so get ready to write down your “BALANCE. We organized ourselves on two main levels: in the first, we thought about the structural, architectural concept, the preparation of the model, and the presentation for the competition; the second was based on the collection of sponsorships, the extremely important and difficult stage. It's hard because people initially reacted reluctantly, being the first time they had heard of SDC. " However, no matter how good the plan was, there had to be a balance, Gabriela's team understood that “in vain we have money to get to Canada and we have nothing to present, and at the same time in vain we had something wonderful to present if we failed to reach Canada ”.

On certain days and without having a coordinating team alive or the stress that the preparation of a bachelor's thesis requires, we go through states of overwhelm. Those are key moments when it is essential to discover what motivates us to continue the work we started with even more passion. Even for an organized person like Gabriela, there were such moments when she told us “there were points where I wanted to give up, we are ultimately people and every day we run into personal situations in which we feel overwhelmed, but I felt from the beginning that my role in the team did not allow me to give up. I felt that I had to take care of the people on the team, to protect them, so I think they motivated me to continue " The story of this SDC generation is special in so many ways. Not only did they stay very close, but they also collaborated and found solutions to all the problems that depended on them. But sometimes there are external factors that we cannot control which influence our path to success. Gabriela told us “now I can laugh about it, but at that moment I could not. Like any team during six months we worked in room 15, we built the models and tested them, we optimized the structures until we reached a variant that we were very satisfied with, we were proud of the presentation and poster. All we had to do was go to Canada. The night before we left, we realized that our presentation was not in the right format. That is how we ended up spending the night in room 15 to adjust our presentation. Being a Power-Point presentation, no more than 2 people could work simultaneously, but the whole team stayed there. People slept on the floor, on rafts, but all of them were there. Nobody left! After a long flight, we arrived in Canada unfortunately our structure did not ... ”. We can only imagine the stress that the team went through in those moments, “from the moment we found out that our model was lost, we started making calls in the hope that we would recover it in time. Part of the team stayed at the airport every day and checked all the flights from Europe. I hoped until the last moment they would return our structure in time to be tested, in vain. Only after we returned to Cluj after three weeks did she arrive and I don't know if we will ever find out where was it lost or what happened to it ”.