T.P.E.G. Alumni Community Theme Park Design Competition 2023 - 1st Place Overall

The T.P.E.G. Alumni Community Theme Park Design Competition was created by alumni of Ohio State's Theme Park Engineering Group. It was started during the COVID-19 pandemic for students who wanted to grow their resume and portfolio when summer jobs weren't available. It continued until the Spring of 2023 when my project group decided to compete.

Our prompt was to create a theme park to occupy the space of a now-abandoned shopping mall. We quickly decided to use cryptids as our central theme. This allowed us to conduct research into urban legends and unknown creature sightings. I'll never forget how passionate each team member was to make this project the best it could be. There were five of us in total. I acted as the project manager by taking notes, organizing the presentation slides, distributing work evenly, on top of creating content with everyone else. I led the blue-sky sessions, assisted with research, created artwork, wrote attraction narratives, and formatted our submission slides.

Throughout the whole experience, the project group never yearned to reach first place. We felt this competition was an exciting way to make the most of our free time on top of engineering and business classes. Other team members put a lot of effort into artistic design, musical score composition, and Planet Coaster mockups. On a night during the last week before submission, we spent over six hours together in the basement of Scott Laboratory to perfect all our work and add final touches. We were happy with the outcome and submitted the work anonymously. 

I, and my entire team, was thrilled to have achieved first place in the Theme Park Design Competition. Looking back, we did not give ourselves enough credit at the time for how much work and genuine passion we put into every slide of the submission. I am proud of the final result and am thankful to have been surrounded and empowered by my peers. I want to thank my teammates (Ella Rudkin, David Manguiet, Audrey Nelson, and Jacob English) for their contributions to this accomplishment.

Please take a moment to scroll through our submission slides below. I have also attached a link to the competition website and to the podcast we were asked to be guests on in the Summer of 2023.