Utilizing Industry Professionals in a Senior Capstone Project

Starting in the academic year of 2016, two regional campuses of Purdue University unified.In doing so, degree programs that were the same on each campus had to align themselves to offer identical courses to allow students to seamlessly move between the two campuses.In general, this did not pose much of a problem for the Construction Engineering and Management Technology (CEMT) degree program as all but two of the courses in the degree program were already being offered on both campuses.The one course that did offer a challenge was Senior Project.The Hammond campus had always had individual projects while the Westville campus (which only started offering the Bachelor of Science in CEMT in 2009) had started using a team project approach.The team projects also involved members of the Industrial Advisory Board, as well as other members of the construction industry, to help plan and evaluate the projects.This paper will look at how the 2018 Senior Project collaborated with industry on the project and the role that the Industrial Advisory Committee had in forging a compromise on how the Senior Project is now being offered on both campuses.