Engaging Community College Students in Earthquake Engineering Research on Real-Time Hybrid Simulation

Community colleges serve as the gateway to higher education in the United States.Engaging community college students in engineering studies especially earthquake engineering research is of significant interests for the San Francisco Bay Area and the state of California.Future earthquake disaster prevention and preparation require that professional civil engineers are trained and recruited into the next generation workforce for the purpose of public safety.With support from NASA through the Curriculum Improvement and Partnership Awards for the Integration of Research (CIPAIR) program, four community college engineering students participated in a tenweek summer research internship program at San Francisco State University in summer 2014.The project focuses on an innovative experimental technique of real-time hybrid simulation for earthquake engineering research.The purpose of the project is to evaluate the effects of delay on real-time hybrid simulation and to apply a probabilistic approach for reliability assessment.MATLAB and Simulink are used and probabilistic concepts are applied to account for characteristics of one hundred ground motions.This research internship program allows for the development of project management, time management and teamwork skills, thus helping strengthen students' knowledge of seismic design in civil engineering and prepare them for successful academic and professional careers.The internship program therefore provides valuable mentorship for community college students during their transition to a four-year college and their decision to pursue a civil engineering profession.