Improving Municipal Infrastructure in Capstone Through a Consulting Firm Model

The capstone experience is the culmination of students' academic careers. It must expose students to a world that will soon be extremely familiar for many - the life of a consulting engineer. In order to provide such an experience, programs throughout the country provide a variety of capstones that challenge students. Although some capstones offer opportunities that deliver a "real-world" project, others continue to offer a traditional project that falls under the rubric of "textbook" problems. Although there may be sound, legitimate support for offering a "textbook" capstone, including the magnitude of work involved for instructors, using a real-world project offers tremendous benefit. In order to ensure that the students' capstone experience is true-to-life, and emulates consulting firms, the transportation capstone program in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at Northeastern University (NU) has created a program that benefits the students and the surrounding communities. The 14 week semester emulates a major project in a consulting firm with project requirements, deliverables, and community meetings. The real-world approach has been in place since 2010 and has involved 18 major infrastructure projects in 12 communities in the greater Boston area. The benefits of the program have been far-reaching, for the communities involved as well as for the students. The anecdotal feedback from all involved has been positive. In order to quantify the benefits of providing a real-world project for students taking the transportation capstone at Northeastern University a survey was performed, in which 87.5% of the recent graduates (e.g., 0.5 years - 2.5 years) thought that the project requirements emulated their non-academic experience. This paper details project identification, team formation, project requirements, deliverables, and survey results.