Senior Projects focus on the synthesis and application of the basic science, mathematics, engineering and design skills taught in earlier courses. It also provides the students with the opportunity to exercise and apply the more advanced material taught in the senior year. Called ‘Capstone’ courses, these culminating design classes give students a rigorously challenging, real-world, immersive engineering experience.

Integrated Courses - Expanded Learning

Senior CEE majors have the opportunity to try their hand at real-world design through a series of integrated capstone courses. All students are required to take either CE 192: Integrated Structural Design from Professor Joseph Nadeau or CE 193: Integrated Environmental Design from Assistant Chair David Schaad. The courses are also interwoven with CE 162: Architectural Engineering taught by Adjunct Professor Chris Brasier.

Students in the courses interact as though they are employees in a virtual design company called Overture Engineering. The structural engineering senior design team focuses on the gravity and the loads of the structure, while the environmental engineering senior design team deals with the land impact issues around the structure. There is plenty of interaction between the two camps. Many students take both the structural or environmental design course and the architectural engineering course, so they are seeing the project from both an architectural and an engineering perspective.