ITRE / News / News Archives / News Release 12-12-06

ITRE's Highway Engineering Concepts Course Holds Winter Graduation

December 12, 2006

Raleigh, NC - The Institute for Transportation Research and Education (ITRE) will hold its annual Highway Engineering Concepts (HEC) graduation exercises December 18 at 2 p.m. in the McKimmon Center at North Carolina State University. Twenty-three North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) employees will receive certificates for completion of the course. Refreshments will be served beforehand at 1:30 p.m.

Those who complete the HEC Course are eligible for up to a $3,000 within-paygrade salary increase, as well as one year credit of educational experience. When qualifying for a new position, this credit could help acquire a higher salary.

ITRE has been teaching this course to NCDOT employees since 1985. The purpose is to give those without civil engineering bachelor’s degrees a chance to compete with those who do for Highway Engineering I level positions. The classes taught in HEC equal in difficulty to junior and senior level collegiate courses.

Participants spend Mondays in the classroom from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. over a 17-week period. They concentrate on topics like transportation planning and engineering, horizontal and vertical alignment, highway design, solid statics/ strength of materials, structural design, geotechnical engineering, and fluid mechanics/hydraulics. The course is taught twice a year, either in Raleigh, Hickory or Kinston.

To graduate, each participant had to complete an Interchange Project Design, which involved designing an interchange on Interstate-95, just south of Roanoke Rapids. The land included a historic property, which provided the students a real-world challenge.

This semester’s featured speaker is Larry Rickard, a transportation tech with NCDOT location and surveys department in Greensboro. A former HEC graduate, Rickard is currently a senior at North Carolina A&T University in civil engineering. For some graduates, the HEC course is a stepping stone toward pursuing a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering.

Three ITRE instructors teach the HEC course: Program Director Bob Foyle, Program Manager Thomas Brown, Ph.D., and Research Associate Chris Cunningham. All are licensed Professional Engineers.

The Institute for Transportation Research and Education (ITRE) is administered by North Carolina State University, is a non-profit organization that conducts research, education, and technical assistance projects on a wide variety of surface transportation issues with the goals of solving problems and creating new products, better services, and smarter workers. ITRE is located on NCSU’s Centennial Campus. For more information about ITRE and related programs, please visit our Web site at www.itre.ncsu.edu.

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