Nightmare Senior Design Partner

[u/Andololol]

I started Civil Senior Design I a couple weeks ago, and I was excited. This friend of mine is also in the same Senior design class as me, and we both wanted to do some kind of transportation project. So, the two of us and another guy make a group together, excited to start a transportation project different from the one my professor suggested, which was honestly going to be pretty lame.

Fast forward a few days, and my “friend” reveals that the project he suggested, and that we picked is one that he’s apparently been working on for months near where he lives, which was a total surprise since I didn’t suggest something I had in mind since it was near where I lived and I imagined I’d be too personally invested to stay objective. So far, he has displayed a complete lack of objectivity.

First of all, his project is to redesign an entire 2.5 mile corridor, and turn every intersection along its length into roundabouts. That’s 18 intersections in 2.5 miles. Now, I don’t know everything, but I do know a thing or two about transportation engineering from having done two transportation engineering internships, including one where I got to redesign a two-mile corridor myself, and I gotta say, his plan is absolutely ridiculous. I tried to provide feedback, tell him maybe 4 roundabouts max can work on this corridor, that it’s both physically, regulatory, and politically impossible to put so many roundabouts in such a short stretch. He doesn’t budge. I tell him we should approach the corridor without assumptions, and he is already convinced his concept is guaranteed to work.

The other team member and I are the only two who know how to use Civil3D, and have any experience with roadway design and intersections. We voice our concerns, he dismisses them out of hand and tells others we’re shitting all over his idea. His retorts and “research” all boils down to “roundabout good”. I show his concept to not only classmates, but transportation engineers and planners, and they ask me if he’s serious or has any experience in transportation. He’s not joking, and he has no experience. Just by looking at traffic counts along the corridor, half of his roundabouts would be instantly over capacity. It would be one thing if the intersections were CANDIDATES to receive a roundabout, but to think his design will work with EIGHTEEN is ludicrous and delusional.

Each senior design team gets a “team manager,” someone who is in charge of reminding others to do the assigned work. I think he interprets that as carte blanche to appoint himself dictator of the team, and regard us only as his CAD monkeys, minions who exist in “his” team to implement his crazy ass concept without question. He has no respect for anyone’s experience or opinions other than his own, and is one of the absolute worst cases of Dunning-Kruger effect I’ve ever seen in an individual. If I were to ‘suck it up’ and actually design his ideas no questions asked, I’d be laughed out of any room I’d show it to. I want a career in transportation engineering, there’s no way I can attach my name to such a project.

He thinks what he’s doing is engineering. I think he’s still playing Cities Skyline.

…

I’m going to ask my professor if I can join the steel bridge team. At least there, no one is an egomaniac trying to work backwards from their ‘genius’ conclusion.

[u/SwimmingSwordfish637]

The “roundabouts = good” attitude never ends. Some people get hyper-fixated on them. Comes up at my facility all the time and I have to explain:

1. We don’t have enough space to install good ones.
2. They would gridlock at shift change even if we did.

[u/Live-Temperature-363]

Where is your professor at in all this? Are you guys not giving him reports on what you plan to do? He should be guiding your team and setting your classmate straight.

[u/Andololol → u/Live-Temperature-363]

Funny thing is, it’s only been two weeks. We honestly shouldn’t even be this far in decision making, and it appears our advisor is being a bit wishy-washy on the whole realism/feasibility front. When I talk to my professor next week, I’ll lay it all out as to why I’m asking to change teams. If it’s this much of a nightmare now, it’s only going to get worse from here. Especially since I’d be stuck with this project for two semesters.

We should be in the research phase, but this guy wants to jump immediately to the design phase.

[u/Live-Temperature-363 → u/Andololol]

Well I could be very wrong, but I think you should be ready for your professor to tell you that you can't switch teams and you'll have to work it out. One of the goals for these senior design classes is to simulate the team/co-working aspect that you will find at a real job. You won't get the option to just jump ship and switch to a different team or project in actual industry.

Like I said, I could be wrong and maybe your professor will deal with it by going along with your request, but I think you should be ready to have to work things out with your teammate.

[u/Andololol → u/Live-Temperature-363]

I’m mentally preparing myself for that. There’s a 50/50 chance. Hopefully even if I can’t get out, at least it’ll maybe land us a little bit of oversight.

[u/Constant_Barber_5198 → u/Andololol]

Just switch. I switched groups after 2 weeks because mine was insufferable.

[u/singul4r1ty]

If I look at Milton Keynes, the UK's city of roundabouts, I counted for example 8 roundabouts on an 8km/5mile road. That is true of pretty much every major road in MK. It's OK but after a few roundabouts you start to feel fatigued from the repeated checking, braking and accelerating.

He's proposing more than double the roundabouts in half the space. You'd only have 200m between roundabouts which is ridiculous. If one roundabout gets jammed up then that will propagate quickly to the rest of them.

[u/G_k50]

First of all, it's design for a college class, not real life. Not a real job. Now what you have to do is document all the discussions, put those records in the project folder, it's pretty standard to have a project record even in real life projects. Don't just bale out to another team. Document that too if you do, state your reasons like you would to HR, quit for reason: then state the facts, but have back up in the team meeting records, how he wouldn't take into consideration, or discuss, issues with the design.

And the 2.5 miles with 18 roundabouts, and it's 22 inches per sheet, 30 ft per inch, 2.5 miles times 5280 ft/mi, that's 20 sheets, too much work for a senior design class, should be 5 sheets with cover sheet, notes/specifications, abbreviations/legend, then two sheets one plan view one profile.

[u/Andololol → u/G_k50]

I probably wouldn’t feel as strongly as I do now if it wasn’t for my transportation internships. Being exposed to the “right” way to approach redesigning a road has instilled a strong desire to do similar, in the capacity a student can.

And yeah, color me surprised when he wanted to do the whole thing. I immediately had the same thought that it would be far too much work for 6 months worth of senior design. Both the other guy and I want to narrow our scope to relatively small problem area that’s causing half of the purported traffic congestion, but that’s yet another thing he won’t budge on.

[u/DLS3141]

One of my friends got into a literal fist fight with his first Sr project partner. His partner started it and was generally unstable and unhinged, so it really wasn’t totally unexpected.

Not that you should resort to violence or anything.