Education

The educational goal of the Center is to create and ensure a multidisciplinary program of learning that will furnish the transportation industry with qualified graduates, at both the undergraduate and graduate level.

While there is a good breadth of expertise in transportation engineering at USU, there is a shortage of transportation engineering faculty. So, the Center will be bringing on more transportation faculty to ensure the depth necessary to allow more transportation engineering courses to be taught at USU.

The programs within the CEE department at USU meet both ABET and general education requirements of the university, guaranteeing a multidisciplinary and technically sound education. Furthermore, the CEE department at USU requires that all of its seniors take, and pass, the Fundamentals of Engineering Exam to graduate.

Undergraduate Education

The CEE department requires that a capstone design project must be undertaken by undergraduate sytudents in order to graduate. A goal of this Center is to have a significant number of students (10 to 12) involed in transportation related senior design projects within 4 years.

Each year the LTAP Center provides a number of opportunities for students to work on LTAP projects in a summer cooperative environment Cooperation between the UTC and LTAP Center shoudl increase the nubmer of students that take advantage of these opportunities

Graduate Education

From the research point of view, a major effort of the Center will be to increase the number of Ph.D. students in transportation, and related, ingineering areas. This will start with a stronger emphasis in recruiting and raising the size of fewwloships offered to Ph.D. students, in an effort to be more nationally competitive. The university has a policy of waiving tuition for all Ph.D. students, and the Center will continue to take advantage of that opportunity.

Each year the Center will select an outstanding graduate student within a tranportation related discipline. The student will receive the $1,000 dollar award, and be sent to the annual TRB meeting along with his/her major professor, expenses for both poaid by the center. For the January 2007 meeting, this student will be selected by the Center Director; in subsequenty years this selection will be made by the Advisory Board

K-12 Education

Engineering State is a program where hight school juniors are invited to spend three days suring the summer on the USU campus participating in activities where engineering principles and disciplines are examined in a hand-on manner. Colleagues from the UTC participate in this program each year, exposing these students to transportation engineeing, as well as other areas of civil engineering.

Faculty from the CEE department at USU travel to high schools in northern Utah, handing out pre-made kits for constructing balsa wood bridges and discuss careers in civil engineering, including transportation. After a couple of months the faculty return and test the bridges for load capacity. This has proven to be a very successful recruitment outreach program.