The first week in December is a busy time for everyone involved in Pitt’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Senior Design Project program. For years this has served as the Capstone event of the students’ academic career, their opportunity to demonstrate their education and the fact that they are ready to take on entry level positions in the “real world”. At the beginning of their final semester they are subdivided into teams and assigned challenging “near real world” problems. The result of their work on these projects is a formal, forty-five minutes long, presentation which is video-taped and made available to faculty and interested engineering practitioners for review and comment. During the final week of classes each team participates remotely in a thirty-minutes long “Question and Answer” Zoom session with the reviewers.
Program coordinator John Sebastian has done an outstanding job recruiting practitioners from the local engineering community to identify appropriate projects, serve as mentors for the students, and to function as reviewers. It is heartwarming to me, each year, to see many of the students I taught functioning in these roles. The contribution of other practitioners and of organizations associated with the actual projects that serve as templates for the students’ work is also highly appreciated.
This term we had thirty-two students divided into eight project teams, six Civil Engineering teams and two Environmental Engineering teams. The variety of projects was impressive, both in type and degree of challenge. Two somewhat similar projects exemplify this. One team tackled the fifty million gallons per day expansion of the current ALCOSAN Waste Water Treatment plant; the other, the design of a new forty thousand gallons per day Potable Water Treatment plant for the Borough of Foxburg. It was quite interesting to see how the difference in size generated completely different types of problems for the teams.
The sub-discipline of Transportation Engineering produced another, somewhat similar, pair of projects. One team produced an alternative design for the exit road from the new terminal at the Greater Pittsburgh Airport; the other, design of an upgrade for the Robb Hollow Road/Painters Run Road intersection in Beadling. Two Structural Engineering projects – expansion of Highmark Stadium from 5,000 to 10,000 seats; and design of a pedestrian lift bridge between James Street and the Library in Bridgeville – were each impressive. The other two projects were the removal of a small dam on Chartiers Creek in Washington, Pa.; and a sustainability case study of a hypothetical community center in Hazlewood.
This semester’s group of students appears to typify the personality of the “Gen-Z” generation. They sincerely want a better world. Let’s reverse the previous century and return our streams to their natural state. Let’s design buildings sustainably, taking into consideration processes that improve our environment, rather than degrade it. Let’s enhance the walkability of our communities. Let’s help small, underserved communities solve engineering problems that they cannot afford otherwise. These are all admirable intentions that merit encouragement.
My review of the eight projects was not as positive as it has been in previous years. Perhaps I am guilty of selective memory – focusing on the best projects of the past and forgetting the ones that weren’t as impressive. Perhaps the current process of subdividing the students into smaller teams than in the past limits both the quality and quantity of work a team can accomplish in one semester. Perhaps the current schedule does not permit mentors to preview the final presentation early enough to permit constructive criticism.
My biggest criticism is the organization of the presentations; at least six of them were confusing and illogical. Several other reviewers commented that it was difficult to determine clearly what the team had selected as its scope, or that the team’s conclusion was not obvious or well defined, or that the “design” was conceptual, lacking enough detail to be evaluated. All of this can be related to an inability to prepare a logical presentation. Is a consequence of our focusing on technical courses and ignoring the humanities courses that emphasize critical thinking and coherent explanation?
When I suggested this to my humanities mentor, my daughter Elizabeth, she responded that she believed the problem started much earlier, in secondary school. It was not limited to engineering students; she noted the same difficulties with her students in the East Asian Literature and Languages department. Even there, these were skills that had to be re-taught to college age students. Perhaps our current love affair with STEM education has had a negative effect on the ability of our students to think creatively and to express themselves logically.
I also am concerned about the consequences growing up in the Digital Information Age has had on the Gen-Z young adults, with “Googling” something for an answer replacing attempting to think it through. This was apparent to me when one of the students on a team I was mentoring reported he was having difficulty completing his assignment because he was still “researching the problem”. It turns out he was actively searching the Internet to find an existing design to match his problem, rather than doing the work of producing an independent design. This attitude really bothers me; how can a student develop creative thinking skills by “researching”?
When I was reviewing the presentations, I was shocked to see that, for the first time in three decades, a team had failed to include a slide thanking the folks who helped them. Even worse, this omission was repeated by a second team, a coincidence too strong to ignore. I wasn’t the only reviewer to note this. Is this a Gen-Z thing? Are the members of this (Entitlement) generation so spoiled that they feel no obligation to express gratitude?
Nonetheless I continue to be optimistic about our current students and their ability to meet the challenges of the future. I suspect their employers will find a way to exploit the positive characteristics of this generation.