Session 1315 - A Serving Profession: Service Learning in Civil Engineering Education Our First Experience with International Senior Design Projects - Lessons Learned

The advantages of international experiences for engineering students are well documented. With this in mind, we decided to take our 18-year-old, client-based, senior design class “on the road.” This foray into the realm of international projects did not come without some anxieties: • Could we properly manage such a long-distance project? • How much of a sacrifice would it be to forego a site visit? • Would codes and regulations be nonexistent or difficult to obtain? • Would our student team experience frustration from communication challenges? • Would we sacrifice technical depth for international breadth? And these are just a few of the many questions and concerns we anticipated. This paper seeks to share our answers to these questions and to provide lessons learned for others to consider. Our focus in this paper is on a project in an underdeveloped country: Trinidad. We start out by addressing how we obtained our first international project and how we selected the student team. The student authors are the project team, and they supply the student perspective on the challenges and rewards. Results of surveys of the students who did domestic senior design projects are also included to show their perspective of their classmates’ project (based on oral reports given to the class). The faculty authors are co-instructors of the senior capstone design course, and they provide insight into administration of the project. The paper ends with a list of lessons learned that may help others to avoid the pitfalls the authors experienced.