Engineering professional societies are leading and prominent providers of engineering outreach activities in the United States. Many outreach efforts are innovative and impressive, but their ability to raise awareness about engineering and recruit more people to study engineering remains largely unknown. Comprehensive assessment and evaluation results that measure how effective these program activities are in meeting their goals and objectives simply are not available. Using the example of an engineering outreach program for high school girls, this paper describes good outreach practices, including use of proven practices and relevant research, effective assessment, and reports of outcomes; provides resources for tools that outreach professionals and practitioners can use to measure and continuously improve outreach impact; and makes the case that application of good engineering practice to outreach delivery is essential to reach engineering professional society outreach goals.
This article discusses a project that implemented several systemic educational reforms in order to determine whether they would increase the awareness of high school students of potential science, math, and engineering careers enough to pursue one of these disciplines in college. The College of Engineering (COE) at San Jose State University (SJSU) in California coordinated the project that included educational reforms that helped increase engineering enrollments over a 5-year period. This vertical slice partnership was unique because it was composed of 12 organizations and educational institutions including the Hewlett Packard Foundation, the COE at SJSU, six K–5 schools, two middle schools, and two high schools in the East San Jose School District. The Hewlett Packard Foundation funded the project and provided personnel who participated in the project. The project demonstrated that the systemic educational reforms that were implemented to modify the delivery methods for math and science courses and the involvement of university faculty members in K–12 education had an impact on high school students selecting engineering as their major in college. This article provides information on how the project was developed, its organizational structure, specific tasks, how tasks were implemented, and the results obtained from the project. In addition to the project increasing engineering enrollments at San Jose State University, the project received the Ron Brown award for industry/education collaborations from the president of the United States.
As designers, engineers provide the basis for the life-cycle quality of constructed facilities and serve as uniquely qualified master builders. For effective performance among the life-cycle stages, it is necessary to design quality-management systems or programs to be accomplished through specifications or special conditions. Materials engineers working on highways have developed objective programs that serve as examples and templates for the development of quality-management specifications. Programs being developed in workmanship expand the engineer’s ability to cover most quality issues and to establish general design practices. Similar programs are emerging in buildings. True values of conformance and performance must be determined through independent data programs. Independent data allow the engineer to serve the owner by connecting all life-cycle stages and optimizing performance among them. This paper demonstrates five material-testing and two workmanship-inspection programs that run independent evaluations; the resulting data interact to help engineers manage projects, programs, and systems.
ASCE has been developing and releasing periodic reports on the status of the nation's infrastructure since 1998. Over the years periodic reports on infrastructure status have also been developed for several states and local jurisdictions. Infrastructure reporting is helpful for sending political decision makers and their constituencies messages about the relative urgency of investing in civil infrastructure in the context of other national priorities, such as education, health care, and security. Periodic infrastructure reporting is also a formal exercise that states and local agencies can use to demonstrate their accountability as infrastructure stewards. This paper presents a decision support tool that was developed to enhance the infrastructure report card process in the state of Georgia. The Infrastructure Rating Tool (IRT) is based on multiple attribute decision making (MADM) and helps the evaluator to make more explicit the scoring criteria used to evaluate the different infrastructure categories, the weights assigned to these criteria to develop an aggregate score, and the scale used in determining the final grade. The tool was developed based on the 2009 ASCE Report Card methodology and first applied in the release of the 2009 ASCE Georgia Infrastructure Report Card. Given that there are subjective elements in the infrastructure reporting process, decision support tools such as the IRT can help to make the process more transparent and objective, and result in the development of more credible decision support information.
The civil engineering profession has long recognized the need for engineers at all levels to enhance their technical expertise with business, leadership, and management capabilities. During its 17-year journey to strengthen the organization, Freese and Nichols found the Baldrige Performance Excellence Criteria to be the most effective guide for building leadership and management skills that deliver planned, sustainable business success. To help educate other engineering firms about the benefits of adopting performance excellence strategies, this article describes the impact of strategic planning and leadership development in building a foundation for organizational success.
The post–World War II American pattern of development is an experiment never before attempted in the history of human settlement. The financial ramifications of this experiment have not been seriously considered. The ways in which growth has been financed at the local level—with government transfer payments, transportation spending, and debt—are unique to the suburban experiment. With these mechanisms of growth, cities routinely trade nominal near-term cash advantages associated with new growth for far greater long-term financial obligations of maintenance. This imbalance has been covered up with a mix of robust growth and debt. Now that accelerating rates of real estate growth can no longer be sustained, America’s cities are experiencing enormous financial hardship. The key to solving this problem is not more growth but a more productive pattern of development, one that creates a positive return on investment at the local level.
Real estate development in suburban and exurban fringe areas defined the latest housing boom in the United States. The development of vast subdivisions of greenfield parcels in counties distant from urban cores and employment centers led to an upward trend in driving distances. A gradually developing and then dramatic run-up in the price of oil from 2003 to 2008 precipitated a gasoline price shock. The convergence of rising gasoline prices and a glut of newly constructed, low-density tract housing led to an equally dramatic decline in new housing starts in areas far from center cities and the older suburbs. Whereas the gasoline price shock affected the number of housing starts, the recession is responsible for the decline in housing prices; the two concepts act independently of one another. By correlating gasoline prices, housing starts in rural counties as compared to urban centers, vehicle efficiency, and vehicle miles traveled data, I have determined that the demand for sprawl development declines substantially as the price of gasoline rises over time. Households not seeking to move are not likely to move purely because of changes in gasoline prices; however, people who have plans to change residence take gasoline prices into account when choosing a new neighborhood. The recent global peak oil production milestone acknowledged by the International Energy Agency (IEA) has significant implications for transportation costs and, therefore, the future efficacy of auto-oriented suburban housing development. Whether these emerging trends continue into the future remains to be seen.
Planned Obsolescence, which can be used interchangeably with programmed obsolescence, and can be either product obsolescence or technology obsolescence, is the intentionally producing goods and services with short economic lives and that stimulates consumers to repeat purchases in a shorter period of time [28]. Few decades ago, there was a strong debate about its ethicality and now it is back on the radar again due to the short cycle times of products coming to the market. This paper will explain why the practice is widespread among various industries and why it works even in a perfectly competitive market. In addition, it will examine the effect obsolescence has on the environment.
In this chapter, the author discusses the uneasy transition from student to professional engineer. Classes, assignments, and the overall school experience are geared toward the developing intellects and functions of children, even in college, whereas practicing engineers are expected to act as adults. They must deal with the messiness and uncertainties of the real world. Real-world problems are often ill defined and open ended and feature all sorts of constraints and interactions with other ill-defined, open-ended problems. A responsible, practicing engineer learns to function, survive, and prosper amid the challenges and ambiguities of the real world. The author lists some approaches to aid in the transition. These are formal mentoring, informal mentoring, internships, and magic. Some find positions with a formal adjustment to the realm of engineering practice, some experience internships. But for most, the approach for their transition can best be described as magic.
Zoning has been a powerful force in shaping the three-dimensional landscape of the urban built environment. Although market forces and private interests have historically controlled the decision-making process, land-use regulations have been used to counter market failures and to collectively guide the growth of the American city. During the second half of the nineteenth century, advancements in construction and building technologies, including the steel structural frame, internal pneumatic and telegraphic communications, efficient mechanical systems, and improved fireproofing materials and techniques, allowed for the construction of structures of increasing height. As tall building construction flourished in major U.S. cities, issues of light, ventilation, and public health, as well as encroachment of incompatible uses, began to capture the public's attention. Where tenement reform laws had addressed residential overcrowding, owners, architects, and public officials viewed building regulations as a means to minimize the negative impacts of increasingly massive structures on surrounding property values and public space. This article discusses the evolution of zoning and its implications for the form of cities and suburbs by tracing the history of New York's first comprehensive zoning law. It first presents the economic, social, and technological forces leading to calls for regulation of the built environment and then examines the passage of the 1916 Zoning Resolution as it related to issues of public health, separation of uses, and real estate economics. Finally, the article explores the effect of zoning on the growth of the New York region, focusing on its impact on urban form and the spatial patterns of development and its relationship to emerging issues of environmental sustainability and urban resilience.
Leadership development has become increasingly important in engineering education as companies look for engineers with leadership, communication, and teamwork skills. To embed these competencies into engineering curricula, a competency-based educational model has been implemented in which 4th-year engineering students led design project teams made up of 1st-year students. The study described in this paper had two aims. The first was to determine which leadership competencies were exhibited by the 4th-year students. The second was to assess their perceived leadership effectiveness. We identified leadership competencies using the behavioral event interview technique and measured leadership effectiveness using a 360-degree assessment. The results demonstrate that the student leaders exhibited the following competencies most frequently: commitment to learning, interpersonal communication, teamwork, and results orientation. The results also indicate that the 1st-year students perceived the student leaders’ leadership effectiveness as satisfactory. The educational model described in this paper can easily be implemented in other institutions to encourage and nurture leadership talent in students.
This article describes the use of undergraduate college students as mentors who receive course credit for carrying out a properly structured mentor-assisted enrichment project (MAEP) with young proteges, using science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education kits and involving professional engineers, so that youth connect “learning about” engineering concepts with “learning how” they are applied in real-world situations. This approach involves both informal and formal education to produce multiple benefits for youth and undergrads, as well as for faculty who supply undergrads as mentors, teachers who supply young proteges, and engineers who share real-world experience. Participating companies and organizations also use this project as an opportunity to recruit future hires.
