Student team digs its way to first place in Not-a-Boring Competition
Dig or die.
That fierce motto carried members of the student design team the Diggeridoos to a first-place finish in the 2026 Not-a-Boring Competition, a challenge to build a machine that can dig underground tunnels effectively and inexpensively. The machine they designed dug through 10 feet, 9 inches of dirt at the competition, beating out other university teams from around the world.
It took six years of attempts, thousands of hours of work, and many failures to achieve this hard-fought victory, according to co–project lead Chris Johnston, a senior in mechanical engineering. "We like to call it 'lunch pail engineering,'" he said, referring to a scrappy commitment to winning in spite of long odds. "It's unbelievable that we were able to turn this team around and bring home that trophy."
Entrepreneur Elon Musk founded the Boring Company, an infrastructure and tunnel construction company, in 2016 after envisioning a vast network of underground tunnels for automated vehicles as a solution to soul-sucking Los Angeles traffic. The student competition kicked off in 2020 to involve universities in creating new designs for tunnel-boring machines. Virginia Tech students have competed with their own machines ever since.
This year, the Diggeridoos came to the competition at the Boring Company’s headquarters in Bastrop, Texas, with around 40 undergraduate team members and $100,000 in funding. But “we're definitely still the underdogs of the competition,” said Lily Donaldson, a senior in industrial and systems engineering and the team’s director of operations. “We're competing against teams that receive millions of funding.”
What team members lacked in funds, they made up for in grit. Co–project lead A.J. Leshem, a senior in mechanical engineering, said team members, who largely come from the College of Engineering, all juggled full course loads. But “there were nights we were up till 4 a.m. welding and grinding. Seeing all that work pay off is really exciting.”
Part of the Diggeridoos’ secret sauce is the support of an avid group of alumni. Former team members, including founders and College of Engineering graduates Joseph O’Such ’24, Taylor Ransford ’24, and Pranav Veenam ’25, hopped on design calls and made frequent return visits to offer technical advice and encouragement.
The team also received vital financial support from industry partners like TotalShield, founded by Adam Rossi ’94, MBA ’97, who enthusiastically announced the Diggeridoos’ win on LinkedIn, writing, “The student challenge exists to crowdsource the breakthroughs that will finally make tunneling 10x faster and cheaper, finding the next-generation of engineers who’ll crack it. The Diggeridoos are those engineers.”
This year’s Not-a-Boring Competition played out over eight days of on-and-off Texas monsoons, complete with hail, lightning, and boatloads of mud. But the Diggeridoos’ five-foot-long boring machine — painted like a narwhal because of its shape — persisted, as did the team itself.
“When it’s crunch time, you need to be able to work under pressure,” said Leshem. “Being able to face those challenges and do whatever it takes to get over or through that wall is definitely something that’s going to stay with me.”
Johnston, Leshem, and Donaldson graduate in May, but they feel confident they’re leaving the team in good hands.
“Something that really speaks to this team's motivation and drive is that our new team leads are already talking about plans for next year, about what can change and improve,” Donaldson said. “The job's not completely done yet. So we're taking the win in stride but we're also looking ahead, and we're excited for what's to come.”
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