To summate and solidify all the technical skills they have learned in their curriculum, Penn State Chemical Engineering students must complete a Capstone Design project before graduating. For this assignment, students work within teams of four or five Chemical Engineering majors to complete their own unique and realistic design of a real-world chemical process.

We as students believe there would be substantial overarching benefit to allowing each student to select his/her own team members who share his/her own values, knowledge, and expectations of quality. For a project of this scale and importance, having a united team behind one is imperative. Each student may select others that compliment his/her own skills, ringing true the old idiom “the value is greater than just the sum of its parts.” All great real-world projects have a skilled and knowledgeable team behind them, consisting of dependable and competent team members. When motivated by the team’s spirit and ingenuity, the learning extracted by any individual team member is so much greater because of this reason. For any student, having team members with similar goals is invaluable when it comes to the final quality of the project and satisfaction with the work contributed.

We as the students implore Penn State to allow us to group ourselves for the ChE 470 Capstone design project.

Please sign this petition so that Penn State Chemical Engineers are able to choose their own teams for the optimal benefit to all.