ADP Outreach: ACE Mentor Program NY

April 22, 2025

The ACE Mentor Program of Greater New York supports and encourages high school students to pursue careers in engineering, design and construction. For decades, our office has been involved in mentoring students, taking them on construction site visits, introducing them to the architectural project phases and demonstrating the endless possibilities in design, especially when it comes to visualization and virtual reality.

The 2025 season began with meetings at firms in many areas of A/E/C: architecture, structural engineering, mechanical engineering, and interior design. It proceeded with a visit to an active construction site and the presentation of a studio design prompt: an aquarium set in Costa Rica.

We enjoyed hosting students at the ADP office, where they had the opportunity to view last year’s project in our virtual reality room and gather precedents for the current project prompt.

Students were given hands-on learning opportunities that included participating in brainstorming activities, researching material samples, learning modeling and visualization software and plotting drawings.

Pictured to the right is an early schematic plan of the project site. Throughout the semester, students were guided through the architectural design process, with weekly milestones that develop skills such as programming, sketching, architectural drawing conventions, visualization and presentation-making.

As the 2025 season of ACE comes to a close, we would like to congratulate the 2,000 participating students for all their hard work in preparing their team studio projects!