I have been involved with the Senior Design Project program at Pitt’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Department for thirty years in different roles – mentor, program coordinator, and reviewer. During that time the program has changed significantly, as has our society and the Civil Engineering profession.
Senior Design is a capstone course, the culmination of the students’ undergraduate career. In their final semester students are required to participate in a multi-discipline team effort to implement a “near-real-world” project. This effort culminates in a formal presentation of their final designs to an audience composed of faculty, friends and family, fellow graduating Seniors, project stakeholders, and practitioners from the local Civil Engineering community.
This semester’s program had the largest number of participants ever, sixty-three students subdivided into eleven teams. Our students are required to acquire a general knowledge of six different disciplines – structural, geotechnical, transportation, water resources, environmental, and construction management; most students also specialize in one of these fields. The final presentation provides an opportunity for them to demonstrate the technical and communication skills they have acquired and to confirm their readiness for the next phase in their engineering career, whether it be as entry level engineers-in-training in the real world or as graduate students in the academic world.
This term the final presentations were scheduled for three consecutive afternoons, in the O’Hara Student Center. As a reviewer, I was privileged to be able to attend the first afternoon in person and to participate remotely, via Zoom, in the other two. I have been able to follow (remotely) these eleven projects since their inception in January, via monthly Zoom sessions reporting progress. The final result of the students’ efforts is indeed impressive.
My favorite definition of Civil Engineering is “Civil Engineers are responsible for designing, constructing, and maintaining infrastructure for the benefit of society, while minimizing its impact on the environment”. This responsibility is greater than ever today as the world’s population continues to skyrocket and the infrastructure required to support it increases in lockstep. This term’s projects reflect that responsibility. Seven of them – Repurposing the BNYMellon Building, Design of Piers for the KennMawr Bridge, Expansion of Highmark Stadium, Reimagining Grand Avenue on Neville Island, Access to Bullock Penns Park, Stabilizing the Sylvan Avenue Landslide, and the Brownsville Overlook – are infrastructure related. Interestingly, the first three are conventional projects dealing with necessities while the other four are focused on improving quality of life for folks with additional leisure time, a consequence of reduced working hours and longer life in retirement. The remaining four projects directly address efforts to reduce the impact our society has on the natural environment – the Jackson Ceramics Superfund Site, the Methane Treatment Facility, the Fracking Waste-Water Treatment Plant, and the ALCOSAN Combined Sewer Remediation Pumping Station.
Although the program still includes the term “design” in its course description, the connotation of the term varies greatly across the six disciplines. It ranges from the traditional work product of Structural engineers, drawings in sufficient detail that a fabricator can manufacture the components for a finished structure; to the Construction Management students’ robust construction plan, which ensures that the design will be constructed efficiently and in accordance with the designer’s intent. In between these extremes are projects that lean heavily on analysis, like stormwater routing or slope stability or traffic congestion, each followed by a recommendation for improvement; and high-level process designs like the process flow sheet and (sized) equipment list for a water treatment facility. Each discipline has its own unique characteristics and its own unique challenges.
It is easy for an experienced third person to observe a final presentation and identify flaws in the team’s design. The team members are inexperienced students whose next career step will be as engineers-in-training, functioning under the close mentorship of licensed professional engineers. I find no fault in the specific errors that occur in these designs; I am however concerned about obvious logical flaws in their final conclusions – these I blame on their mentors. The team converting methane emissions from landfills into pipeline quality natural gas justified the cost of the process they designed with a selling price for the product that their industry mentor commented was an aberration, off by a factor of five, an observation that was obvious to anyone who has ever paid a monthly bill for gas. Similarly, two different teams “designed” pedestrian bridges using bent-plate steel tub girders and reported costs dramatically higher than the most expensive traditional pedestrian bridges from previous projects. I wonder how many times I have heard my colleague Kent Harries pontificate, “Let’s do a reality check!” In fairness to the faculty mentors, the accelerated schedule of the projects does not permit time for a close review of the work the students have done; nonetheless the public reporting of apparently illogical results is bothersome.
The presentations have far more positive characteristics than the handful of trivial flaws that I have mentioned. All these students are outstanding communicators – the quality of their Power Point slides is much better than that of most of the adults that I hear in other venues, and most of the students are also comfortable, articulate speakers. The students’ access and ability to use powerful software programs to analyze complicated problems – indeterminate structures, soil stability, traffic congestion, network scheduling, storm-water flood routing, etc. – continues to increase each year. All they lack is judgment and “big-picture” thinking; both of which will come with experience. Even though the premises on which some of the projects were based may be questionable, the students did indeed effectively solve the problems they were assigned. I think they are admirably equipped to take their place in today’s “real world”. Kudos to the program coordinators, the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department faculty, and the industry mentors.