Enhancing the Civil and Environmental Engineering Capstone Program at Brigham Young University through On-Campus Internships and Graduate Student Mentors

Culminating educational experiences such as capstone design projects are playing an increasingly important role in meeting the educational objectives of Civil & Environmental Engineering degrees. In recent years both the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) have placed a focus on the development of management, leadership and general business skills. Capstone programs offer an ideal environment that provides a synthesis of the fundamental technical engineering skills in developing a culminating design while creating an opportunity to focus on all of the professional practice skills necessary for students to become future leaders in their field. Recognizing the opportunity to enhance development of these complimentary professional skills in the curriculum, the CE Department at Brigham Young University (BYU) has revamped its capstone class to provide experience in communication, project management, mentoring, leadership, and teamwork through real-world, hands-on projects. This evolving program engages graduate students as mentors and facilitators of industry sponsored projects. Undergraduate student teams have the opportunity to practice important collaboration skills while completing their design project independently as an on-campus internship. Since the program was first piloted in 2010, fifteen different agencies and companies have sponsored more than thirty projects. This article describes the evolution of this innovative capstone experience and outlines the current program at BYU. It also presents a comparison between the BYU CE program and other universities. Defining the Capstone Course Capstone courses have become a widespread culminating experience in undergraduate engineering programs. They are largely the result of engineering programs seeking to better meet the needs of industry and have become so important that ABET requires universities to include them . Nevertheless, capstone programs vary widely from school to school and a single definition that applies to all programs does not exist. According to Fairchild and Taylor , capstone projects are “culminating experiences in which students synthesize the skills they have acquired, integrate cross-disciplinary knowledge, and connect theory and application in preparation for entry into a career.” Durel [3] offers another perspective stating that capstone can be seen as a “rite of passage or luminal threshold through which participants change their status from student to graduate. A capstone course should be a synthesis, reflection and integration, and a bridge or a real-world preparatory experience that focuses on the post-graduation future.” Other definitions include, a crowning course or experience coming at the end of a sequence of courses with the specific objective of integrating a body of relatively fragmented knowledge into a unified whole , and an experimental learning activity in which analytical knowledge gained from previous courses is joined with the practice of engineering in a final hands-on project which according to Wagener [5] attempts to integrate, extend, critique, and apply the knowledge gained in the major. In today’s world many professors and college graduates have observed that it takes more than technical expertise to be a successful professional. A wide range of nontechnical skills are essential: leadership, teamwork, problem solving, decision making, critical thinking, interpersonal communication, and management. These types of skills are often referred to as “soft skills.” To help students develop both soft and technical skills, the objectives of a capstone course, project, or experience should typically include the following : Provide students an opportunity to synthesize knowledge from formal and informal learning and apply such knowledge to contemporary issues in the field Help prepare students for a successful career by providing experiences that enhance their labor market advantage Increase students’ understanding of the “big picture” including ethical and social issues related to the field Help students understand the relevance of theory and research to practice Provide opportunities for teamwork and leadership Because of the importance of capstone programs, ABET has delineated key components that these programs must have to be valid capstone experiences and to induce students to develop and apply both soft and technical skills. ABET has emphasized the need for engineering capstone courses to build teamwork, communication, and project based skills. Furthermore, ABET has mandated that capstone programs require students to work in multidisciplinary teams and design a system to meet desired needs within realistic constraints. In summary, ABET states that “students must be prepared for engineering practice through a curriculum culminating in a major design experience based on the knowledge and skills acquired in earlier course work and incorporating appropriate engineering standards and multiple realistic constraints.” [7] Survey of Civil Engineering Capstone Programs Although engineering capstone programs at different institutions may have many variations in their structure and operation, many of them share some basic components. According to a survey of several engineering disciplines conducted by Howe and Wilbarger , many universities currently offer a one or two semester engineering capstone program with simultaneous class and project components. Although the survey included all engineering disciplines with only a few included CE programs, it provides a framework baseline from which a CE capstone program can be evaluated. A popular arrangement for the surveyed engineering capstone programs is to group 4 to 6 students into a team and either assign projects to the teams or let the teams choose a project of their interest. The survey indicated that 71% of the projects are based on real-world problems. Other sources of projects are faculty research or design competitions. Schools usually participate in both real-world and academic projects by pairing faculty members with the student groups. The educational institution usually finances the projects, though industry sponsorships have become more frequent. Sponsors are often granted some or all intellectual property rights, and sponsoring companies are becoming more involved with the students’ teams. The survey estimated that the majority of engineering capstone industrial sponsors is contributing less than $500 per project while the cost of completing the project is less than $1,000. While most accredited universities have adopted capstone courses in their CE departments few have published details about their programs. One reason may be that many of these programs are relatively new and still evolving. About 50% of CE departments have capstone programs that are less than 5 years old and only about 10% have programs older than 15 years. The capstone program at the University of Utah [9] has been evolving over the past 14 years. The course is based upon a proposed infrastructure project and the students manage the entire process including developing a preliminary engineering study as well as gathering county, city and state budget information that will be used for planning purposes. The students are divided into threeperson teams that are individually responsible for specific elements of the project. At Purdue University [10] students work on projects that are either being considered or in the process of being designed. However, each student on a team completes the required design for one of the CE subspecialties (geotechnical, environmental/water resources, construction, and transportation). At UC Berkeley [11] there is a capstone course for each CE sub-discipline where teams are formed to address design, construction and maintenance of contemporary civil and environmental engineering systems. The capstone program at University of Washington [12] is offered in 2 different courses. The first course is a design seminar that covers the fundamentals of integrated CE practice and design. The second course involves a capstone design project that can be in transportation and construction, structures and geotechnical, environmental, or water resources and hydrology depending on a student's interest. Real-world, community-based projects are assigned to the CE students at North Dakota State University . By selecting community-based projects, the department strives to enrich the academic experience of the students and emphasize the relevance of the discipline to the society. The concept of service learning links community service to academic study so that each strengthens the other. The Seattle University [14] CE capstone program has been in existence for the past 20 years and is unique because the projects are fully supported by industrial sponsors. Sponsors typically contribute from $5,000 to $20,000 depending on the organization’s annual revenue. The funds are used to cover the faculty and staff time spent supervising the projects as well as any equipment needed for the projects. Each student team spends approximately 1000 hours on a project. A review of these different capstone programs, where efforts appear to have been made to include deeper learning, indicate that they all incorporated the following elements: Only available to seniors as a graduation requirement. Teams either mentored by experienced engineering consultants who sponsored the projects or by faculty advisers. Real-world projects rather than academic or contrived projects. These projects could involve redesigning an existing project to determine if a better solution could be obtained, designing a new project, or working on a small portion of a larger project. Barriers to Implementation of Comprehensive Capstone Courses Our experience in developing a comprehensive capstone course shows that while it is ideal to have real-world projec