Open-ended projects for graduate school-bound undergraduate students in civil engineering

This paper describes a series of open-ended project classes called Junior/Senior Engineering Clinics as part of the curriculum at the Department of Civil Engineering at Rowan University. The emphasis of this paper is on projects that prepare graduate school-bound students who would benefit from a research-oriented project versus a industry-oriented project. These projects involve multi-disciplinary teams composed of undergraduate students with mixed Junior and Senior status. The purpose of this paper is to share our experiences in undergraduate research and to promote similar efforts in providing undergraduate students with graduate-school type research. Two main projects will be described in this paper. One project involves intelligent surveillance in transportation engineering by using pattern recognition techniques and video image processing. Another project involves the modeling and analysis of truss and suspension bridges in the Delaware Valley region. Both projects involve graduate-level mathematics and modeling techniques such as Linear Predictive Coding, multi-objective optimization, finite element analysis, and frequency domain analysis. In addition to the technical aspects of projects, students also experience practical aspects of research-oriented projects such as proposal drafting, project management, research report submission, conference paper writing, and weekly research meetings. The Junior/Senior Engineering Clinics provide the structure for open-ended projects to occur regularly as part of the undergraduate course study.