Engagement in Practice: A model for community partnership in an infrastructure capstone course.

In the Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 semesters, capstone design faculty in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln engaged in a partnership with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln extension, industry and community organizations including the Chamber of Commerce from the city of Columbus, Nebraska. The partnership between the university and the municipality provided students an opportunity to create comprehensive and creative design solutions to real engineering challenges identified by community stakeholders. The community projects were identified prior to the beginning of the Fall 2020 semester by the city chamber of commerce as well as local industry partners. At the initiation of the partnership, the city entities realized the benefit of receiving creative potential solutions to meet real community needs. Benefits to the students of this community-engaged capstone partnership included gaining real world experience communicating with the public and clients to understand their needs, learning to ask questions to discover underlining reasons for specific requests; working with professional engineers to find existing data, and learning to accept feedback from the public, clients, and professional engineers about their work. Student and public stakeholder responses indicate that both groups recognized benefits from the engagement aspect of the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]