Engineering Design Opportunities At The United States Military Academy

The United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point has developed a program to promote academic activities beyond the basic requirements. With a three semester design sequence, this program can enhance student learning and experience with the design process and give students a head start on their capstone project. Although the academy’s mission is to prepare cadets for future military service and provide them with an undergraduate degree, we have expanded the academic experience with opportunities to conduct research and design work with scientists and engineers in some of the nation’s finest facilities. The Academic Individual Academic Development (AIAD) program is purely voluntary, but over half of the mechanical engineering majors give up free or leave time to participate in it every summer. The AIADs are usually three or four weeks in duration due to the busy cadet summer schedules, but this is ample time to allow the cadets to work on, and sometimes solve, an engineering problem. The Army Materiel Command (AMC) sponsors most of the AIADs, but there have been sponsors from private engineering organizations, NASA, national labs, and even the Air Force. This paper describes the AIAD program, and discusses how feedback from program sponsors can be used to measure student progress toward meeting ABET EC 2000 criteria.