 In 1981, at 21 and still an undergraduate, Lin won a public design competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, to be built on the National Mall in Washington D.C.Her design, one of 1,422 submissions, specified a black granite wall with the names of 57,939 fallen soldiers carved into its face (hundreds more have been added since the dedication), to be v-shaped, with one side pointing toward the Lincoln Memorial and the other toward the Washington Monument.The memorial was completed in late October 1982 and dedicated in November 1982.