QCAM Capstone Teams Spring 2023
One of the most promising ways QCAM has developed to get students involved and engaged with the QCAM pipeline is through the senior Capstone program at NMSU. These Capstone projects are the culminating experience of all engineering undergraduates’ academic life, giving them an opportunity to apply the knowledge gained through coursework to solve a real-world problem through engineering design. Teams of seniors collaborate on projects in the fall and spring semesters of their final year. They design, build and test their innovations under the supervision of professors researching cutting-edge technology and professional engineers with engineering problems to solve.
Each QCAM-supported Capstone team is paired with one of our National Lab partners as clients/mentors who help them develop their design. Besides being a great learning experience, this also puts students in direct connection with our National lab partners. Once connected it becomes much easier to further engage them in the pipeline such as summer internships and career positions.
Just this spring, we had 8 senior undergraduate students complete their QCAM-sponsored Capstone design projects and presented them at the Capstone Design Day on May 5, 2023. The teams from this spring were partnered with Kansas City National Security Campus on “Polymer Additive Manufacturing Pressure Vessels” and Los Alamos National Laboratory on “Using Acoustics (e.g. Pulse-Echo Technique) to Interrogate AM Parts made with Polymer Blends of Nylon”
We are also proud to report that one of the students who was a part of the LANL team was hired to a full-time position at LANL as a direct result of their participation in this program.