Inside the Schoenecker Center, Jalon Jones ’25 paged through documents to explain the civil components to guests visiting his team’s station at the Senior Design Clinic. He was one of six civil engineering majors at the University of St. Thomas paired with RJ Ryan Construction Inc. to create a blueprint for a state-of-the-art car dealership. The task had several parameters. They had to build the dealership in a specific location, which meant addressing the site’s poor soil conditions while making it sustainable for the environment.
A total of 26 School of Engineering students across six teams presented their senior design projects, which took two semesters to complete. These students collaborated with St. Thomas local industry partners including U.S. Air Force, Ergotron, 3M, Boston Scientific, RJ Ryan Construction Inc. and Seeweed Underwater Game Cameras. Each industry partner presented the teams with a problem to identify, solve and then design a solution.
“It's a great opportunity for them to really see what they might actually be doing in their careers,” said Travis Welt, associate professor and chair of civil engineering. “This show is where they get to show their friends, family, colleagues, employers and the sponsors of those projects what they’ve done over the course of those two semesters.”
Watching School of Engineering students grow from being first-year students with an interest in engineering to using the comprehensive skills they’ve learned from all the courses they’ve taken and applying it to real-world problems is why Welt loves the event.
“What makes us unique is that we train students to be leaders; we train students to be problem-solvers,” Welt said. “All of our faculty are coming from a place of experience so when we teach our students, we're teaching them from our own experience as design professionals, for the industry that they're going to go into.”
St. Thomas is Minnesota’s leading private institution for engineering education, boasting a robust enrollment of over 1,400 students. Each graduating senior participates in a capstone project based on real-world concepts presented by the industry partners.
At the Senior Design Clinic, students displayed machines and poster board concepts to explain the problems they solved.
“We found solutions by talking with each other, doing a lot of self-learning and just making sure we put aside some time each day to work on the project,” Jones said about the car dealership project.
To tackle the issue, the team of six divided into two. One side worked on the structural components and the other handled the civil. For the civil aspects, Jones, Lucas Herrmann '25 and Alex Revoir '25 worked together using programs AutoCad and Civil 3D to provide construction documents such as a site plan, as well as grading and utilities plans, to present to RJ Ryan Construction.
Their grading plan, for example, made sure water will slope away from the building’s foundation and that on-site storm water would be routed through a storage, which would improve the water quality before it enters the city’s storm system, Jones said. The team also created a utilities plan that involved implementing a storm sewer pipe system.
“We also designed the steel structure above like the columns, beams and joists,” said Ian Hensley ’25, who worked on the structural team.
The structural team, Hensley, Nadine Allee ’25 and Aidan McKeefry ’25, designed the edges of the facility to have piles on the edge of the slab that would go 80 feet into the ground due to the soil conditions, which wouldn’t be strong enough to support the structure. The ideal depth is 25-30 feet. They formed a new, more sturdy foundation to address this challenge.
“A big component in our project was trying to understand how we can build deep foundations,” said McKeefry, who illustrated the problem and their solution to it with side-by-side soil samples.
“As a civil engineer, I think there is a lot of satisfaction within the work because you're often working on some sort of infrastructure, whether that’s roads, buildings or bridges,” Jones said. “Simply being able to go out and potentially see the work that you helped on leaves you with a deep sense of purpose, as well as satisfaction.”
