Bike Fork Optimization

In my Mechanical Design course, a competition was held to see which group of mechanical engineering students could design a bike fork with the highest strength to weight ratio. The bike forks were made from only very thin balsa wood and glue. The goal was to use Siemen's NX to design the fork and to optimize the design using finite element analysis. My group of three finished in fifth place (out of about 30 teams) both in the simulated, and real life strength to weight ratio testing.