ENCN493-20X (C) General non-calendar-based 2020

Project

30 points

Details:
Start Date: Monday, 17 February 2020
End Date: Sunday, 15 November 2020
Withdrawal Dates
Last Day to withdraw from this course:
  • Without financial penalty (full fee refund): Friday, 28 February 2020
  • Without academic penalty (including no fee refund): Friday, 4 September 2020

Description

Engineering Research Project

The third professional year project is very different to all other final year courses. It is not based on formal lectures, laboratories and tutorials, but instead allows you to research a problem that interests you under the close supervision of an academic staff member. The vast majority of students who undertake the project find it a very rewarding experience.

Students who are wishing to pursue future postgraduate study will see the project as an excellent
opportunity to sample the postgraduate research environment, and to explore possible avenues
future research.

The majority of students will enrol in the semester 2 project course, ENCN493X1. Some students
may enrol in the full year project course, ENCN493X, but only for special circumstances that require an approval from the Third Pro Coordinator. Both courses are worth 30 points or 0.25EFTS.

All projects, with a few exceptions due to special circumstances, are undertaken in pairs. This
approach has a number of advantages. Firstly, group projects enable more ambitious projects to be tackled; secondly, the skill of working as part of a team is seen as very important by future employers; and thirdly the number of projects (and accompanying resources) that need to be made available is substantially less than if the projects were done individually.

The culmination of the project is the CNRE Research Conference 2020 to be held at the end of the
academic year. This conference attempts to emulate the type of environment you would encounter if you attended a conference either as a professional engineer or as a researcher. You and your partner will present the results of your work to an audience of your peers, academics and possibly industry representatives, and you will have the opportunity to hear about the research of your fellow students. In keeping with our intention to emulate a real conference there will be an invited keynote speaker to launch the conference.

Learning Outcomes

The third professional project is designed to provide you with an opportunity to:

 undertake a substantial, challenging and open-ended engineering research project,
 experience working in a research environment,
 be mentored in the development of independent research and problem solving skills,
 derive and implement as appropriate methodology for a particular problem,
 plan and undertake a project as part of a team,
 manage a project with time and possibly budget constraints,
 analyse and interpret data from the literature, modelling, or experiments,
 experience a typical engineering conference, and
 demonstrate your communication skills through writing, and orally presenting, a conference
paper.

It is worth noting that many of the skills you will acquire and develop in the project match the key
skills the profession are requesting from our graduates.

Prerequisites

Restrictions

ENCI493, ENCI494, ENCN494

Course Coordinator

Chin-Long Lee

Course Administrator

Emma Clark

Assessment

One of the objectives of the project is to provide you with the experience of working within a research environment. In order to make this experience more realistic the project will attempt to simulate the process of undertaking research that leads to the presentation of your results at a research conference. This conference, the “CNRE Research Conference 2020”, will be held at the end of the academic year. Each project team will prepare a concise conference paper to be included in the conference proceedings, and deliver an oral presentation at the conference itself.  Full details regarding the conference will be provided towards the end of the year.

The assessment for the project is based on this conference model and details of the assessment
schedule can be found in Appendix A. The milestones associated with the assessment are listed in Appendix B.

The oral presentations will be judged by expert panels and prizes will be awarded for the most outstanding presentations.

Attendance at the conference is compulsory for all students. Please put the date and time in your diary now.

Assessment of the project will take a number of forms and will involve the supervisor, an independent assessor (someone not on the supervisory team) and an oral panel. In addition, the student members of the project team will provide the supervisor with guidance on some aspects of the assessment. In general terms the assessment is designed to address three key areas: research quality, communication ability, and professionalism. Some of these aspects will be judged on the team performance while others will be based on individual performance. In addition, the supervisor of each project will form a judgement on the individual contribution of each student to the project outcomes and may, if they see reason to do so, adjust the marks of each student, up or down, to reflect this.

Indicative Fees

Domestic fee $2,204.00

International fee $11,000.00

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.

For further information see Civil and Natural Resources Engineering .

All ENCN493 Occurrences

  • ENCN493-20X (C) General non-calendar-based 2020
  • ENCN493-20S2 (C) Semester Two 2020 - Not Offered
  • ENCN493-20W (C) Whole Year 2020 - Not Offered
  • ENCN493-20X1 (C) Special non-calendar-based One 2020