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And the students’ deliverables are comparable to those of professionals-“at least equivalent and, in some cases, maybe even better,” says Paul Cannon, an engineer at ATK, one of the nation’s premier aerospace and defense companies. Sponsors pay $20,000 to fund a Capstone project, a cheap alternative to standard engineering-firm estimates. “Just having the Boeing name on your résumé does a lot.” Harding (BS ’09), whose team designed a piece to be used in the assembly of Boeing’s 777 airplane.
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“Capstone gave me great real-world experience,” says Spencer C. 500 (turn the page for a glimpse of project no. Just this year, Capstone surpassed project no. The program, a required senior-year course for all mechanical engineering majors, has given thousands of engineering students hands-on experience with authentic industrial projects. Today, 19 years later, the Capstone program has more than 200 national and international sponsors. Magleby (BS ’83) and started knocking on doors at Geneva Steel, Hill Air Force Base, GM, Ford, and others, asking, “Ever heard of BYU?” and “Would you be interested in turning over a back-burner project to a team of engineering undergraduate students?” “And I sensed that what we were teaching students wasn’t as relevant as it ought to be to really prepare them for what would be expected of them in industry.” With that conviction, he teamed up with mechanical engineering professors Carl D. “I had this reservoir of experience seeing what real engineers did,” recalls Todd, who had returned to academia after spearheading dozens of successfulprojects for Michelin Tire and GM. It was one of the first four projects in BYU’s Engineering and Technology Capstone Course: Integrated Product and Process Design, a course dreamed up by several faculty members and initiated during the 1990–91 school year with a new professor, Robert H. For Erickson, it’s like visiting an old friend, one that, with 60,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, cuts through bone, stone, and metal.Įrickson and a team of eight engineering undergraduates built the machine from the ground up over the course of their senior year. “Every time I visit campus, I still go down and stare at it,” says Erickson, today a research and development engineering manager at Hewlett-Packard. Erickson (BS ’91), the requisite stop in any campus visit is the water-jet cutting machine in the basement of the Crabtree Building. For others, it’s a mint brownie at the Wilk. Some alumni drive past the Maeser Building. Manning (BS ’87), a former Boeing engineer, the team designed an attachment that will be implemented in up to 84 places on the line. A team of BYU student engineers got the grand tour of the plant when they were recruited to replace an attachment mechanism on the 777 assembly line. The world’s largest twin-engine airplane is constructed in the world’s largest building: the Boeing manufacturing facility in Washington.