Duke Civil & Environmental Engineering alumni look back on lessons learned from their uniquely structured senior capstone class.
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What’s Owed to an Overture?
You’ve probably never heard of Overture Engineering, even though it’s a firm that’s been working with Duke for the past 20 years. Comprised of architects, structural engineers and environmental engineers, the group develops designs for a new building on campus every spring.
The reason you haven’t heard of it is because the firm isn’t technically real—but the learning experiences it provides its “employees” are very much so.
The logo of the Overture Engineering ‘firm.’
Overture Engineering is the fictional firm that Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) students “join” as part of their senior design capstone course. As employees of the firm, students are tasked with developing design plans for a theoretical building on a real location around Duke’s campus. The location changes every year, ranging from the land alongside Gross Hall to the forested lot across from Cameron Indoor Stadium.
An environmental engineering team from Duke CEE Class of 2025 works on their capstone design plans in the Architectural, Structural & Environmental Design Studio in Hudson Hall
The students are split into the firm’s three divisions: architecture, structural engineering, and environmental engineering. The architects determine the building’s look and form. The structural engineers calculate how the building can withstand physical forces such as gravity, wind and earthquakes. The environmental engineers analyze the building’s interactions with surrounding natural resources, dealing with matters like contaminant remediation, stormwater flow and the distribution of usable water inside the building.
Members of the Duke CEE Class of 2025 discuss design plans
David Schaad, a CEE professor of the practice and licensed professional engineer (PE), has instructed the environmental division for the past two decades. Alongside Schaad, the structural division is led by Joe Nadeau, a fellow professor of the practice and PE; and the architectural division is led by Chris Brasier, an adjunct CEE professor and working professional architect. “It’s been great working with the two of them over these 20 years,” Schaad said.
The three professors aimed to enhance the capstone course as a culminating experience for the CEE seniors. “You want it to be that bridge between what the students have learned and what they’re going to be doing next,” said Schaad.
To achieve this, they “conceptualized this idea where the students keep time sheets and send requests for information (RFIs, or memos) back and forth to communicate between the different divisions, just like they would in the real world.”
Schaad hopes this experience not only allows the students to draw from all the knowledge they’ve gained over their time at Duke, but also “shows them the interconnectedness of the ways that (engineers) think about projects.”
“A lot of what we do is not actually giving (the students) information: it’s helping them apply that information in a way that they own it.”
Seniors from the CEE Class of 2025celebrate a computer modelingbreakthroughfor their capstone
That year, the building site was an undeveloped area behind the Duke Wellness Center, which included a steep slope that ran down into a creek. Bailey’s team was already considering ideas for stormwater drainage when they received the design plans from the architectural team. That was where things went a bit sideways.
“Our architectural team put the building in the middle of the steep slope,” Bailey said. “That was not ideal, because then you have stormwater running into the side of your building. And there wasn’t enough room to put in a retention pond to slow the runoff before discharging it.”
This kickstarted an exchange of RFIs between the two teams, where the environmental engineers asked the architects why they had put the building where they did. Ultimately, by corresponding with each other, the teams came to an agreement to shift the building up to a higher point on their site. This gave Bailey’s team enough space to implement a working stormwater drainage system.
A lot of times, we met problems in the capstone class that felt new. But each time, you could break the problem down into smaller pieces that we had spent the past four years studying.
Sarah BaileyWater Resources Engineer, Hazen and Sawyer | Class of 2024
Leaving a paper trail of RFIs also allowed Bailey’s team to easily explain the design changes they made during their final capstone presentation. “That’s something Dr. Schaad explicitly told us: to present things in a narrative format,” she recalled.
“If your client or correspondent is not an engineer—which many times they aren’t—you can’t just throw them a graph and expect them to decipher it,” Bailey said. “You’re supposed to evaluate the data and tell them what it means for them in the long term. That’s where the storytelling comes in.”
Bailey (back row, third from right) with the rest of the Duke CEE Class of 2024
While the capstone was a good encapsulation of what she had learned throughout her time at Duke, Bailey noted that it was still “a very challenging course because it applied everything that we learned in ways that were different from a theoretical class.”
Bailey found she often made headway in the capstone by distilling more complex problems down into concepts she was familiar with.
“A lot of times, we met problems in the capstone class that felt new. But each time, you could break the problem down into smaller pieces that we had spent the past four years studying.”
Bailey on asite visit assessing drainage infrastructure for a Hazen and Sawyer culvert project. Credit: Connor Bottorff
This approach of breaking things down serves Bailey well in her current role as assistant engineer at the environmental engineering firm Hazen and Sawyer, where she works with the stormwater and water resources management teams. In a recent project that required her to model a weir, she found herself digging into papers about the fundamentals of weirs and their coefficients. “Finally, I got to the bottom of what we were doing and then built my way back up,” she said. “Then I could justify to my colleagues, ‘this is why we needed to model it this way.'”
The View from 9 Years Later
Eunice Leung stands in front of Two Manhattan West, a 62-story office tower that she helped design as an engineer at SOM.
From buildings overseas in China to the Two West Manhattan skyscraper in New York, Eunice Leung has worked some incredible projects in her time so far as a structural engineer.
A CEE alum who studied the structural engineering & mechanics track, Leung graduated from Duke in 2016. She did a year-long master’s program in civil engineering at the University of California, Berkeley before joining the architectural and engineering firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) as a junior engineer.
Over the past eight years, Leung has become a licensed PE and risen to the position of associate at SOM, where she manages projects and leads a team of other engineers.
When asked about her structural capstone experience, Leung echoed Bailey’s sentiment that one big takeaway was the ability to deconstruct complex challenges into their basic parts.
At Duke, we’re taught how to think more than how to just do.
Eunice Leung, PEStructural Engineering Associate, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill | Class of 2016
“At Duke, we’re taught how to think more than how to just do,” she said. “And this is very important, because I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen the same project twice. Every building is a little different, so many times I have not done the nitty-gritty of a new project before. But I know how to break it back down into the simple components I’ve previously learned.”
As a team leader, Leung found that this approach also aids her in working with other people. “When you lead a team, your role is to vet the results. So you have to know enough about the foundations of design in order to look at others’ designs and go, ‘Does this make sense?’”
Leung also coordinates often with the architects at her firm, like how she did during the capstone. “Coordination is a very real aspect of how a building gets built.” Being exposed early to the practices of RFIs and interdisciplinary communication gave her a leg up in this regard.
On a recent project, Leung also discovered that one of the SOM architects she was coordinating with was also a CEE alum: Laura Sciarrino, who graduated in 2013. While they never met as students, they’ve enjoyed working together professionally for the past couple of years.
“Being on the structural track and in the architectural engineering certificate program, I experienced both the architect and structural engineer roles during the capstone project,” Sciarrino said. “While I am an architect now, the knowledge I learned as an engineer at Duke has made working with engineers easier.”
Leung concurred with Sciarrino, saying that because Sciarrino “has the foundations of engineering, there are times when talking to her is much easier versus other architects, because she understands our perspective.”
Their connection extends beyond work as well: earlier this year, Leung and Sciarrino attended Duke’s Sweet 16 basketball game in New Jersey together.
As Leung remarked, “The Duke Bond is there for sure.”
Leung and Sciarrino: coworkers by day, Blue Devils by (game) night!
Building Leaders as Well as Learners
Although they’re at different points in their professional journeys, Bailey, Leung, and Sciarrino’s reflections on their time at Duke all revealed the problem-solving approach and understanding of interdisciplinary collaboration that Schaad hoped students would take away from their experience with Overture Engineering.
“Our students are really good at big picture thinking,” he remarked. “So many of them quickly go on to be leaders in their fields, and they’re eventually managing the people who are doing the designs. But you’ve got to understand how to do design work to be able to manage people doing the design work. And I think this capstone does a very robust job of preparing them for that.”
The CEE Class of 2025 on Harrington Engineering Quad with a tensegrity structure
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