One of the primary functions of the Technical Society of Knoxville is sharing the experience of technical professionals with the public and this is an excellent opportunity for the society to make a contribution to education.
Request for Participation from Dr. Jennifer
Retherford
The Senior Design Project in the University of Tennessee Civil and Environmental Engineering Department is the culmination of all technical lessons learned during undergraduate studies. Students participating in the Senior Design Project are enrolled in their final semester as an undergraduate and eagerly entering the work force. This course is a major stepping stone as they transition from academia to the professional world.
Involvement of local professional engineers significantly improves the Senior Design Project experience. Many students prior to this course have minimal interaction with design professionals and little real world experience. These students have many questions and many lessons to learn about how the practice works beyond the “Given:’s” in the classroom homework assignments.
I am currently looking for volunteer participation for the spring semester of the Senior Design Project. Though the course is a Civil/Environmental course, I’d be happy to have any engineer visit the class. In the past, visitors have participated in a number of different ways. For example, one young engineer discussed his transition from school to work. A project meeting was developed for other visiting engineers who provided direct feedback on the students’ projects, resulting in an experience similar to a peer review or review by a senior project engineer. A third guest lecturer gave an interesting presentation on engineering failures. Each experience was not at all a lecture, but many turned into question and answer sessions. In the peer review meeting, the burden of the discussion was the responsibility of the students and the guest did not prepare any presentation material.
The information that you can share just from your experience is quite remarkable, and sometimes overlooked. The students in this class have many questions, ranging from professional development to completeness of construction documents to technical analysis questions. We were fortunate to have eight guests visit our class this fall and the students absorbed the information from quite diverse topics. I hope to continue
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to recruit local professionals
and further develop the relationship between these young engineers and their soon-to-be employers.
Please contact me for more information (jqretherford@utk.edu) about the Senior Design Project and ways that you can become involved. The course starts up again in January and meets Mondays, Wednesdays,
and Fridays at 2:30 pm.