Every year, in celebration of Engineering Week, Ducommun Aerostructures holds a fun, in-house competition among employees, to which they usually invite Parsons High School to participate.
“They used to have a pine box derby,” PHS construction and building trades teacher James Gilpin said. “The way I understand it, their corporate sent them this Build-A-Bike competition as a possibility to replace that.”
Parsons Ducommun jumped on the new contest theme, and as in years past invited PHS to bring a team to join in.
They had 10 total teams of adults. Each company team consisted of an engineer and someone off the floor. The PHS team consisted of Gilpin and three “pretty mechanically minded” students - Steven Scofield, Anthony Bauer and Mason Williams.
Each team was allowed to lay out all of the parts before the clock was started for the timed event. 
“I think we finished a good five minutes before the other teams,” said Scofield, who had a little background experience having built a trike for his niece before.
“They had a bike mechanic there. You had to go have an inspection before you were considered to be done, because they are going to donate those bikes to the Rec, so they wanted to make sure people didn’t just slap them together.” Gilpin said. “That was pretty cool they were donating them.”
The high school team took the first place win and brought home the trophies.
PHS may have had a slight advantage given they had four on their team. However, Gilpin said with a chuckle, they were students up against experienced engineers so the way they figured it, that leveled the playing field somewhat.
“It’s just kind of a fun thing to do, but we kind of take the competition seriously,” Gilpin said, laughing..
“It was fun knowing we could beat them, but it was really fun just getting to go there and do that,” Scofield added.
Gilpin said the event, in addition to being fun, is PR and a recruitment tool for Ducommun as well.
“The kids got to take a very extensive tour after we were done. They got to see quite a bit,” Gilpin said. “ I’ve been on tours before at Ducommun and it’s never been that detailed. It was nice. So it was a good career exploration trip for them, plus we got to compete and have some fun.”