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The Crossover Episode: Civil Engineering Meets Interdisciplinary Business

Dr. Thomas Brennan of the Civil Engineering Department joined faculty from across the College to participate in the 2022 National Science Foundation (NSF) STEM for All Video Showcase: Access, Inclusion and Equity. The showcase is an annual virtual event that hosts hundreds of 3-minute video presentations from federally-funded projects working to improve STEM education. “Principal Investigators, practitioners, administrators, researchers, policy makers, industry and the public at large are encouraged to participate” by viewing the videos, contributing to the online discussion and voting on those videos that are “most effective in conveying the creative work being done.” 

TCNJ’s 2022 video submission focused on presenting the results of the third year of TCNJ’s Collaborating Across Boundaries (CAB) project which “tests a curricular model for deepening TCNJ undergraduate STEM literacy by participating in interdisciplinary community-based collaborations.”    

For his faculty collaboration project, Dr. Brennan teamed up with Professor Kevin Michaels of TCNJ’s School of Business to work alongside community partner, New Jersey Professional Engineers In Construction.  Michaels and Brennan’s undergraduate first-year students worked to consider the legal, technical and management considerations of a proposed construction project. Dr. Brennan and his civil engineering students were able to offer perspectives on the actual designs of the project while Prof. Michaels and the business students contributed their understanding of relevant business concepts such as cost of financing and liabilities.

Since this year’s TCNJ video submission focused on highlighting some of the best practices that have come out of the CAB research, Dr. Brennan discusses the importance of creating a virtual learning and project management space for an interdisciplinary class in a course management system like Canvas used by all faculty and students at TCNJ.  

Click here to watch the video featuring Dr. Brennan. 

– Anisa Lateef ‘22

 

If you are an engineering student and did something awesome you want us to know about, email us at: soengweb@tcnj.edu.