CJ Day
Over 45 students plan to present projects and display their work, a culmination of a semester’s worth of effort, for the University of Wyoming’s College of Engineering and Applied Science’s (CEAS) Senior Design Symposium.
“It’s their capstone project, so it’s a really big deal,” said Mindy Peep, the marketing specialist for CEAS, who worked to promote this year’s symposium. “It marks a transition, when these students are finally going on to their jobs and careers.”
The symposium is a yearly tradition for the CEAS, and students that present often plan their project months or even years in advance. Students have the option to present alone; however, most choose to group up into teams so as to better split the workload.
“We started thinking about what we wanted to do in January, and we started recruiting our little team in June, way before the project was supposed to start,” said Mike Gardner, a member of a group who will be presenting on a topic in petroleum engineering. “Since then, it’s been a lot of sleepless nights. With all the time in the simulator, plus all the time we’ve spent doing other things, it’s in the hundreds of hours.”
Gardner and his teammates have been meeting almost every night since the start of the semester to put together their project, which analyses the efficiency of two different oil drilling methods. They received an initial data set from the oil company Beacon Offshore in Sept., and used that data to model the drilling methods in a simulator.
After over 200 hours in the simulator, the team then analysed their results to determine which method of drilling was more efficient. Their results caused a bit of a stir within the petroleum engineering department, said Jessica Walsh, another member of the team.
“There aren’t a lot of other projects within the department [that] are doing anything similar to what we’re doing,” Walsh said. “Even outside of the college, there are companies and other people who want to use the data we collected.”
This team, which also features fellow petroleum engineering students Nick Brown, Dallin Call and Isaah Parra, is not the only team presenting at the Senior Design Symposium. The event will also feature dozens of projects from the disciplines of petroleum engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and computer science.
While many of the projects are a bit too specialized for the average non-engineer to understand, many others are more accessible.
“I’m not an engineer,” said Peep. “But a lot of these projects, you don’t have to be an engineer to understand what’s so important about them.”
Peep said this year’s symposium features many projects that are slightly outside the norm for their discipline.
“You see mechanical engineering and you’re expecting them to be designing new NASA space shuttles or something like that, and there are those sorts of projects,” she said. “But there’s projects like making organic packaging for beer, and that’s a bit more outside the norm.”
This year also features many projects designed to help those with disabilities, from a team that designed motorized shelving for those who struggle with normal shelves, to another team that designed a tool to help those with motor disabilities grab objects beyond their reach. Other projects include new methods of extracting CBD oil from hemp and new advances in VR programming.
“We really want to emphasize how engineering is a big part of everyday life,” said Peep. “The phones we’re using to communicate were engineered by someone, the computer code that allows us to communicate was engineered by a software engineer.”
Presenting all the projects at once allows students to make connections across disciplines and helps them to have a network of professional contacts before they leave the university. In addition, the symposium allows underclassmen to see the sorts of things they will be building in their chosen area of study.
The symposium is open to the greater campus community, so students outside the College of Engineering and Applied Science can take a look at the projects. Peep said she felt it was important for those outside CEAS to check out the projects.
“It’s good for those who aren’t engineers to come out and support their fellow students,” she said. “They’ve put in hundreds of hours into these projects, and it’s important to see that work recognized.”
For those interested, the Symposium starts at 8 a.m. on the second floor of the Wyoming Union today. Not every team will present at the same time, so students can contact the CEAS office for a full list of projects and times.
