2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) is a military-focused college, where students serve in the U.S. armed forces upon graduation. The civil engineering program conducts a required three-week summer field engineering course focusing on hands-on skills that help bridge the gap between theory and practice. This course is generally taken between the sophomore and junior year, and prior to most of the other civil engineering courses. Approximately 75 students take the course annually. Most are civil engineering majors at USAFA, but approximately one-third of the students come from other military colleges and Reserve Officer Training Corps programs from around the country. The course includes field trips, lab exercises, and hands-on activities intended to give students a practical frame-of-reference that is helpful in subsequent analysis and design courses.

Most activities consist of some pre-reading, a short classroom lesson, the hands-on portion, and finally a quiz or laboratory practical exercise. Both the quizzes and practical exercises serve as low stakes assessments. Faculty develop the course materials and teach the classroom lesson, but to execute the hands-on portion, the faculty rely on approximately 25 tradespeople or “mentors.” The mentors are surveyors, electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and equipment operators that also serve in the U.S. armed forces in either an active, guard, reserve, or civilian status. The mentors generally demonstrate to the students how to perform a particular skill, and then let the students perform the work. The amount of oversight and coaching the mentors provide is tailored to the nature of the activity and each individual student’s needs. Industry experts also conduct several field trips for students within the course.

In addition to learning technical skills from the mentors, students learn about their future roles and responsibilities after graduation since many will be charged to lead enlisted and civilian tradespersons. The interaction in the field engineering course also offers opportunities for the students to learn what the enlisted force expects of their leaders. Student to mentor discussions take place during the hands-on activities, informally during breaks, and formally during a series of panel sessions.

In this paper, we will describe the course and the nature of the interaction between students and mentors. Student survey and interview results show that they tremendously value the interactions with mentors both as a component of their learning in the course and for their development as leaders. The approach to leverage tradespeople to teach and mentor students in a civil engineering course has been successful in motivating students to choose and persist in the civil engineering major at USAFA and could be a useful benchmark for other engineering programs.