Interdisciplinary Graduate Experience: Lessons Learned

Abstract

Engineers interact in the workplace with technical peers in other disciplines at all stages of design, development, and application. Awareness of the constraints and needs of the other disciplines can be key in many situations. Such interdisciplinary activity and the associated communication are facilitated if the all participants have a solid knowledge of discipline-specific terminology and an understanding of connecting concepts. Consequently, experience relating to interdisciplinary teamwork is a necessary component of engineering education. The Smart Engineering Group at the University of Missouri-Rolla was established to conduct interdisciplinary research and to create interdisciplinary educational resources. The topical interest area is smart structures which requires the integration of materials, structures, sensing, signal processing, manufacturing, etc. The interdisciplinary research and educational activities of the group, the assessment of those activities, and the experiences of several graduate students will be described. The effectiveness of collaborative student work was tied to the students' understanding of the needed synergy and their comfort with cross-disciplinary communication. Also, an interdisciplinary course, which grew out of the group's experiences, provided systematic preparation for graduate research projects. The role of this course will be discussed as it relates to the quality of collaborative experiences from both student and faculty perspectives. I.

Smart Truss for Education

“…The Smart Truss Bridge has been used in the interdisciplinary 'Smart Materials and Sensors' course at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, formerly the University of Missouri Rolla (Watkins et al, 2002a(Watkins et al, , 2004. Here, the content areas are smart structures technologies with emphasis on hands-on laboratories and interdisciplinary collaboration.…”