California Polytechnic University, California
April 10, 2025
April 10, 2025
April 12, 2025
10.18260/1-2--55207
https://peer.asee.org/55207
Dr. Sultana is a Senior Engineer at the California Department of Transportation and teaches water resources engineering courses at the Department of Civil Engineering and Construction Engineering Management (CECEM) at California State University, Long Beach. She enjoys sharing her engineering design experience with engineering students and preparing them to meet industry demand.
She received PhD in 2011 from the University of California, Irvine. Her area of specialization is water resources engineering, and she is a licensed professional engineer in the state of California.
Stormwater management has become a key component in engineering design since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972. Initial efforts to improve water quality using the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit focused primarily on reducing pollutants from industrial wastewater and municipal sewage discharges. The most recent NPDES 2022 permit requires businesses and owners operating in an area of 10,000 ft2 and larger to treat the stormwater runoff onsite before runoff flows to the nearby waterbody. To meet the permit requirements, facilities are spending millions of dollars to build different structural devices and apply various non-structural measures. The ongoing efforts for stormwater permit compliance opened new career opportunities, particularly for civil engineering students. However, stormwater management involves knowledge of hydrology, hydraulics, and environmental engineering principles, and thus the courses on stormwater management are offered at the graduate level. A graduate course on stormwater management is offered at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) but not yet at other CSU and UC campuses within the Southern California region. In Spring 2024, CSULB with collaborative partners offered a two full-day workshop to develop a workforce that knows the need for and effort on stormwater management. Thirty undergraduate and graduate students of CSULB and California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA)’s Civil Engineering program have joined the first cohort and learned design guidance and stormwater management modeling using the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) SWMM model. The participants had a positive effect and 80% of the students shared that they have greatly benefited from the two-day workshop. Identifying various industry needs and organizing cross-campus workshops can be a great way to bridge the gap between degree programs to prepare our students for industry. The workshop was funded by the California Sea Grant.
Sultana, R. (2025, April), Workshop to bridge the gap between programs to prepare students for industry demand Paper presented at 2025 ASEE PSW Conference, California Polytechnic University, California. 10.18260/1-2--55207
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