LSU Senior Capstone: Semester 1, in review
Senior Capstone: what is it? Why am I taking it? What was it like? I hope that current and future LSU students will find this and appreciate my thoughts and experience and find it helpful. Learn a little bit more about how I ended up in ME here. This one is a little bit longer than most of my blogs, so buckle in.
**As a note, these thoughts are my own and are not reflective of LSU or the Mechanical Engineering department**
Getting to Senior Capstone
First thing first, you have to get to and be eligible for Senior Capstone. This is no small feat. In my personal opinion, the LSU Mechanical Engineering program is one of THE TOUGHEST degree programs at LSU, if not the most difficult. Thermodynamics (thermo), fluids, and heat transfer are three major hang up courses in this degree. I had to take thermo and fluids twice, each. However, the second time I managed to get an A and B, respectively, and I’m incredibly proud of these facts. In order to get into senior capstone, let’s take a gander at the flowchart. I am using catalog year 2021, as that is my personal catalog year and things have changed quite a bit since then.
As you can see, to get to ME 4243 (Senior Capstone, first semester) there is a tonnnnnnn of coursework, which… duh. However, a couple of major points to note. 1) Machine Design 1, Machine Design 2, Design 1, and Design 2 are only offered Fall, Spring, Fall, Spring. This is important for sequencing purposes. 2) Notice the little “GPA” symbol in the top right corner of Design 1. This means that you must have a major GPA of a 2.0 and an overall GPA of 2.0 before being allowed to enter capstone. I believe this is an ABET requirement.
Why does it matter?
Now, why does this GPA thing matter? Well, in a lot of degree programs you have A LOT of classes that require a C or better to pass the class. This isn’t the case for a lot of ME classes, which means you have to self manage yourself to a C average, which can be difficult for students, especially if you don’t have an advisor who reviews this fact with you every semester during advising time. When a D is passing (especially in those more difficult courses), it is easy to just get the D and roll on without thinking about the effects to your GPA come capstone time.
Picking a Project
So you’ve made it to senior capstone. Yay! Now what? Well, first you are presented with a ridiculous number of projects to review. I think we had over 50 in the booklet. It can be very overwhelming trying to sort through all the projects and figure out which ones you are interested in. After reviewing, you have to pick your top 5 to put on your “list”. Now, I picked my top 14 because if too many people pick one in your top 5, you won’t be able to select it. I wanted to be prepared for the worst case, but I was fast enough to put in the top 5 I wanted.
Now… what happens after I select my top 5? That… is a great question. No one really knows. We always joke that they “put them in a black box” and whatever it spits out is what you get. You have absolutely no control after submitting your top 5. It is a “you get what you get, and don’t throw a fit” type scenario. I was fortunate to get my top choice, however I should have read the project information more carefully.
My Senior Capstone Project was assigned… now the “fun” begins
I was assigned the NASA Lunar Services Robot Competition, which was actually my top choice. This is funny because I swore I wasn’t going to do a competition project, but I didn’t read the intro packet well enough to realize that’s what this was. We are a team of 8, made up of 4 MEs, 3 EEs, and an ECE. I got very lucky with a fantastic group that works together well and everyone pulls their weight towards our common goals: passing capstone and maybe doing well in the competition. I won’t focus too much on the details of our robot, as we are still actively working towards the competition and I don’t want to give anything away, but I’ll come back to that after graduation when I talk about the second semester of capstone.
What next?
After projects are assigned, there is this awkward “get to know you” phase of working with your team. You have to pick a team leader and start working towards a game plan of how you are going to accomplish your project. Our project is HUGE and consists of two main components: the competition and capstone. For the competition, we have to design, on paper, a fully capable lunar robot to perform station maintenance. For capstone, we have to design and build a prototype of this rover. It is essentially two projects in one and has been one of the largest challenges I’ve faced to date.
So first, picking a team leader. No one in our group was particularly interested in being team leader, so I volunteered for the position. I think I’ve done a pretty good job, but I will let my team be the judge of that. Being team lead means managing lots of administrative pieces behind the scenes. From keeping up with the Gantt Chart, to assigning tasks as needed, to helping us stay on schedule and continue moving forward, it has been a true challenge. I’m grateful for my management experience in the professional world, which I think has helped me greatly in this role.
The Game Plan
Next was tackling a game plan of how to move forward. During the first semester of capstone, you are entirely focused on analysis and on paper design. One thing we really struggled with at the beginning of the semester was a lack of feedback and direction. There was no clear scope of what we needed to accomplish to satisfy capstone requirements, since the actual project proposal was just about the competition. In addition, we received no real feedback until midterms. We started over FOUR times. This set us back in our timeline quite a bit. However, we managed to get it done.
First, we had to tackle what functions our robot was going to perform. This is where we had to start over four times. Once we finally got past this stage, we were able to move on with designing, CAD’ing, and beginning the different types of analysis that were necessary to prove the robot was feasible. Our robot has 12 subsystems and each team member was assigned at least one. This worked best for our team in terms of keeping things organized and making sure everyone knew what they were responsible for. Of course, there is cross-collaboration, as is necessary for any project.
Final Presentations
The entire semester culminated in two main things: a 30 minute final presentation given to a panel of industry professionals and a final report to cover all of the things we had done all semester. You would be surprised how hard it is to cut everything down to 30 minutes when you have two almost completely separate projects to cover. We covered both our full scale and prototype rover in 131 slides in 31 minutes. We could have easily talked for an hour to cover everything in its entirety.
Overall, our presentation went very well and we got a lot of positive feedback from the panel. It was nerve wracking, but practicing several times ahead of time was key to our success I think.
Overall Thoughts and Advice
Senior Capstone has been the most challenging thing I’ve done in my degree to date. It’s designed this way, and it’s true. However, it’s very doable with the right people and willingness to put the work in. One thing I wish we had done differently, was been more insistent on feedback earlier in the semester so that we could have moved forward more seamlessly. You are ALWAYS behind. Operating with this mindset keeps you in the grind mode. Start early and work on capstone a little bit every single day. Communicate with your team. No one should be blindsided come evaluation time. The conversations may be hard, but your team will operate more cohesively if you do. Pick a project that looks middle-of-the-road difficulty wise. You don’t want to pick a project (like mine) that is overly difficult, but you also don’t want to pick a project that is ridiculously easy because they will tear it apart.
I’m incredibly proud of my team and all that we accomplished over the semester. I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to work with. I’m also very grateful to our advisor and sponsor for all their help throughout a stressful semester.
Of course I couldn’t get a picture with the entire group, but maybe next semester, lol.
