Building An Engineer Through A Work Based Education Program

Every fall, most academic departments at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York begin developing summer internships for cadets, which enable them to bridge the intellectual or cognitive gap between school and work. These opportunities are reserved for emerging junior and senior cadets who are otherwise not conducting military training during the summer. In the Department of Systems Engineering, we establish many opportunities with government and non-government affiliated agencies to help organizations solve Systems Engineering, Engineering Management, Operations Research and Information Systems Engineering related problems. This program is entitled “Academic Individual Advanced Development” (AIAD) and is vital to the educational development of cadets and provides them with an opportunity to participate in activities beyond our baseline requirements. These AIAD opportunities are designed to allow students to work with military and civilian organizations for a three-to-four week period and discover the “real world” applicability of their academic endeavors here at West Point. These experiences broaden student perspectives; provide them with practical advanced education related to their professional responsibilities as student leaders and future commissioned officers. Participating agencies gain by having additional personnel to work on engineering projects, and by having the opportunity to expose future Army leaders to the important functions performed by their organization. Some AIAD opportunities extend beyond the summer into the academic year as CAPSTONE projects. These projects continue to allow a cadet the opportunity to discover the “real world” applicability of their academic endeavors. This paper explores the uniqueness and nature of our program, its purpose, our process for matching skills with a participating agency and follow-up feedback from cadets. This feedback is used to assess the viability of the program for future students and participating agencies. This paper provides practical guidelines for implementing such a program in any engineering curriculum to enhance a student’s engineering education and learning.