A pair of Hampton graduates who attended A.W. Beattie Career Center were part of a team that recently won a national competition.
Hanna Gibson and Nathan Tabon, who were in A.W. Beattie’s Carpentry/Building Construction programs, competed in the 2-year College Residential Construction Management Competition at the International Builders Show in Las Vegas. Gibson graduated from Hampton in 2017, and Tabon in 2018.
Their five-person team from Penn College beat out 14 other schools for the first-place finish. Gibson and Tabon participated in the same competition at the high school level through A.W. Beattie and placed fourth nationally in separate years.
“It means a lot, because we worked really long hours to be able to go and compete,” Gibson said. “To have all of the effort we put in payoff is great.”
Carpentry and Building Construction instructor John Brown was not surprised that Tabon and Gibson have excelled in college.
“Hanna is very organized, and she’s a leader, so I’m not surprised she pulled the team together,” Brown said. “Nate has learned very quickly, and it’s the same with him. He’s a good leader. He’s organized. They’re both really committed.”
Penn College’s team had to recreate an existing home in South Carolina down to every code and specification of a specific township, a task that presented a unique challenge for students who had not had previously designed anything to withstand hurricanes and earthquakes.
They were required to present a complete set of construction drawings, a materials list and construction schedule to a panel of judges after four months of work.
“This is very intense and very high end,” Brown said. “It’s a lot of hard work. And remember these two are in college full-time with a full course load on top of doing this intense project to the specs of a South Carolina town. They had to make phone calls and do their research to do it right.”
Tabon knew from the first meeting that the project would be difficult.
“The difference between the high school competition and our competition is that there’s so much depth in the college competition and so much time you have to put into it.” Tabon said. “The first day I was in the group they were talking about seismic issues, and that’s just one thing where it was confusing and I didn’t initially know what to do. There was a lot of in-depth reading and research.”
Gibson is a Residential Construction Management major at Penn College. Tabon is enrolled in Commercial Construction Management.
