Projectium Research

Introduction: Why Transportation Engineering Projects Are Commonly Misunderstood   Students often find projects in transportation engineering confusing, because projects appear to either reward students for doing excessive field work or reward students for their ability to use complex software programs. Some spend weeks out on the road carrying out traffic surveys on the road, and others spend months constructing simulation models and analysing results. Many people think that the amount of effort, as we say, physical or mental effort of students, will determine how well they have done an assignment, but to the outside examiner, projects are not this way. To look at transportation engineering is not from the perspective of the competition of labour and software sophistication, but instead as how folks act within constrained systems and act. The applications of traffic data, models and performance indicators are only meaningful if they are interpreted responsibly, with realistic ...

Introduction: Results Are Where Engineering Responsibility Begins   Results and conclusions are not a formality in civil engineering academia. They are a good indicator of when an outside examiner determines if a student is merely crunching numbers along a slide or has begun gaining insight into the respect inherent in the five-thousand-year-old concept of engineering judgment. Across universities in the world, examiners are consistently remarking that projects fail to succeed, not because the analysis is wrong, but because the results are presented without interpretation and conclusions are written without restraint. Many students feel that when numerical outputs have been obtained and graphs have been plotted, the job is pretty much done. The same section is treated very differently, however, by examiners. For them, results are the beginning of criticism, not its completion, and conclusions are seen as professional commitments rather than summaries. This difference of interpr...