A comparison between the challenges faced by chemical engineering alumni in the workplace and the challenges faced by chemical engineering students during their capstone
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Saudi Digital Library
Abstract
Capstone projects have gained global interest to better equip students with the necessary skills
and to facilitate their transition from academia to the professional workplace. To understand this
transition, this exploratory research aims to inspect the experiences of chemical engineering
students at the University of Strathclyde and chemical engineering alumni in terms of the
challenges they encounter when working on the capstone project and in the professional
workplace, respectively. Consequently, drawing a qualitative and quantitative comparison between the
two groups enables us to conclude to what extent the current capstone model simulates the
professional environment. Challenges related to teamwork, time management, and communication
were reported frequently by both groups, which shows some degree of similarity between the two
environments. However, the alumni considerably voiced additional challenges with respect to project
management, leadership, and the application of engineering knowledge to real-life problems. The
results suggest that these are the major deficiencies in the capstone project, which are worth further
investigation to examine the feasibility of introducing challenges in terms of the deficient components
to enhance the current capstone model. Moreover, students were found to underestimate the
importance of data analysis and ethics in their capstone project. Finally, the distribution of challenges
based on gender showed that female students were primarily exposed to communication challenges as
opposed to male students, who had a higher relative frequency in challenges regarding the accessibility
of resources.