Development Of Undergraduate Laboratory Experience In Environmental Engineering

Currently, undergraduate students in environmental engineering at the University of Illinois and many other schools have very limited laboratory experience. This is a great disadvantage in a profession where field and laboratory techniques are crucial skills for the job market and for graduate school. With the assistance of The National Science Foundation and the University of Illinois for purchase of instruments and construction of a dedicated laboratory, a course has been developed with the goal of involving undergraduate students in significant laboratory and field experience and having them relate that experience to design applications. This course, which is a permanent addition to the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) curriculum, is a hands-on laboratory course in which students are involved in acquisition of data necessary for the development of environmental programs, design of treatment systems, and evaluation of compliance with regulatory requirements. The students work with the analytical procedures that are used to generate the data used by professionals before they enter the work force. The benefits to the students are: o Associate abstract concepts taught in traditional lectures with real world phenomena, o Interrelate classroom approaches to design and operation with actual acquisition of basic data required for design, o Understanding the limitations of these data and how to work with the data to develop design criteria or regulatory frame works. P ge 682.1 The course consists of a series of modules representative of the breadth of environmental engineering: air, solid and hazardous waste, wastewater treatment, water treatment, toxicity assessment, and field ecological assessments. These experimental modules will be described and past experience in conducting the course will be presented.