INFRASTRUCTURE MASONS
Capstone Projects Deliver Fresh Engineers By Jeff Omelchuck , Executive Director , Infrastructure Masons took my undergraduate degree at Montana
I State , mostly for the skiing , truth be told . I studied Industrial Engineering , which was perhaps an odd choice as Montana had little industry - at the time , Montana ’ s biggest export was college graduates . So , because there was little industry around , my senior “ Capstone ” project was synthetic . We were given a product ( ours was an electronic alarm clock ), and our assignment was to design , on paper , a manufacturing system to make them . It was an important experience , integrating much of what we ’ d studied : manufacturing processes , supply chain management , cost accounting , quality assurance , plant layout , etc . And it worked ! A few months later , I was designing production systems for mainframe computers in Silicon Valley .
So , when iMasons wanted to introduce university students to the digital infrastructure industry , a Capstone Project seemed like a good approach . Phillip Marangella introduced us to Hampton University , a small HBCU in southern Virginia , and we were off and running . The school of Engineering and Technology at Hampton includes Electrical and Computer Engineering and Architecture . We pitched the idea of doing a Capstone in digital infrastructure to the students , hoping at least one team would pick us . We were thrilled when two student teams of engineers and architects chose the iMasons project . Offering them scholarships may have influenced their decision .
In the first semester , the students were given a fictitious mobile phone app with given latency and bandwidth requirements and a user growth curve in the US market . Their assignment was to determine how many data centres , of what size , to put where , to serve
that demand , considering population centres , access to power and fibre , natural hazards , etc . In the second semester , they had to pick one of those locations and design the data centre : choose an actual site in that market , select the IT hardware , determine power requirements , cooling strategy , specify all the power and cooling equipment , layout the site and building , and develop CAPEX and OPEX budgets . As they worked on the project , the students met weekly with a team of iMasons mentors who answered questions , provided feedback , and introduced the students to professionals around the world who could answer questions they couldn ’ t . In this feature , you ’ ll hear from the mentors , Phillip Marangella , Chheng Lim and Bill Kleyman , about what it was like to get to know these students on that journey .
In April , the students presented their final designs to a panel of senior executives who
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