that course is now longer required, no environmental students have opted to take it
for many years.
Laboratory Courses: The environmental engineers in charge of waste treatment
are seldom blessed with well-trained technicians. While a technician who was
educated at a community college might enjoy working at a water treatment plant,
the stink of sewage treatment or of municipal solid waste is discouraging. There are
nicer jobs in hospital labs or industrial labs. The usual result is environmental
technicians who must be trained on the job and who may have no education after
high school. The good ones flourish while the bad ones make mistakes, and an
effective boss must understand the methods in order to spot the good technicians and
to weed out the bad. Laboratory courses are essential for students in environmental
engineering. To save money, one approach is to have more options in existing
laboratory courses. With less time spent on stretching asphalt or breaking specimens,
there could be more experiments for measuring BOD, COD, chlorine residual, and
the like. These tests and more as videos can be found on YouTube or elsewhere.
As education evolves and knowledge expands, there is not enough room in a
curriculum to cover everything that is relevant; something has to give. Few civil
engineering students now learn surveying. The civil/environmental option has focus
on microbiology, appreciation of ground water hydrology, and introductory courses
about water treatment and waste treatment. To earn their degrees in civil engineering, there are required courses such as structures and the like that consume the
available time. To make room for more courses in the environmental option, it may
be wise to compact some of the basic civil engineering into sections only for
environmental engineers while providing less depth.
Another way to make room in environmental courses is to devote less time to
background topics. Environmental engineering courses tend to attract students from
other departments who have taken several courses in chemistry and biology. The
civil/environmental students need to catch up. This author used to spend 2 weeks
lecturing about these topics until deciding to assign web pages to supplement only
1 week of lectures. Good students who learned and retained this material and paid for
it in previous courses breezed through these web pages, while other students
struggled but reached a sufficient level of understanding for the environmental
engineering.
3 Presentation Skills
This author has been blessed to have had two or three wonderful teachers and to have
collaborated with two or three colleagues who were magnificent lecturers. Developing such outstanding presentation skills for students is so unlikely that other measures deserved a trial. One that had a bad start was assigning term projects for which
teams of three students would videotape a short technical presentation. All of the
students were required to watch the videos of at least three other teams and to submit
a paragraph with comments. The bad news was that a friend who lived down the
380
H. R. Bungay III
for many years.
Laboratory Courses: The environmental engineers in charge of waste treatment
are seldom blessed with well-trained technicians. While a technician who was
educated at a community college might enjoy working at a water treatment plant,
the stink of sewage treatment or of municipal solid waste is discouraging. There are
nicer jobs in hospital labs or industrial labs. The usual result is environmental
technicians who must be trained on the job and who may have no education after
high school. The good ones flourish while the bad ones make mistakes, and an
effective boss must understand the methods in order to spot the good technicians and
to weed out the bad. Laboratory courses are essential for students in environmental
engineering. To save money, one approach is to have more options in existing
laboratory courses. With less time spent on stretching asphalt or breaking specimens,
there could be more experiments for measuring BOD, COD, chlorine residual, and
the like. These tests and more as videos can be found on YouTube or elsewhere.
As education evolves and knowledge expands, there is not enough room in a
curriculum to cover everything that is relevant; something has to give. Few civil
engineering students now learn surveying. The civil/environmental option has focus
on microbiology, appreciation of ground water hydrology, and introductory courses
about water treatment and waste treatment. To earn their degrees in civil engineering, there are required courses such as structures and the like that consume the
available time. To make room for more courses in the environmental option, it may
be wise to compact some of the basic civil engineering into sections only for
environmental engineers while providing less depth.
Another way to make room in environmental courses is to devote less time to
background topics. Environmental engineering courses tend to attract students from
other departments who have taken several courses in chemistry and biology. The
civil/environmental students need to catch up. This author used to spend 2 weeks
lecturing about these topics until deciding to assign web pages to supplement only
1 week of lectures. Good students who learned and retained this material and paid for
it in previous courses breezed through these web pages, while other students
struggled but reached a sufficient level of understanding for the environmental
engineering.
3 Presentation Skills
This author has been blessed to have had two or three wonderful teachers and to have
collaborated with two or three colleagues who were magnificent lecturers. Developing such outstanding presentation skills for students is so unlikely that other measures deserved a trial. One that had a bad start was assigning term projects for which
teams of three students would videotape a short technical presentation. All of the
students were required to watch the videos of at least three other teams and to submit
a paragraph with comments. The bad news was that a friend who lived down the
380
H. R. Bungay III