Although increased safety measures have been implemented in the mechanical engineering shops, they are cutting into the time students are granted to work on their senior projects.
Mechanical engineering senior Lucas Gauthreaux said the increased safety measures started when a Yale graduate student was killed in April of last year while working in a shop by herself.
Before that incident, Gauthreaux said students were given keys to access the shops and weren’t given limits on the machinery or usage hours.
Now, he said heavy-duty machinery has lockout systems that shut off the equipment, like the band saw, at 7 p.m. when the faculty supervisor leaves.
Mechanical engineering senior Matthew Lousteau said seniors split their final year between two classes, one semester spent designing a final project on paper and the other fabricating the design and bringing it to life.
Work for these projects may be completed in the engineering shops, depending on the project, which can be as complex as designing.
However, Lousteau, a former Reveille employee, said the shops, which are normally scheduled to be open from 6 a.m. until 10:30 p.m., closed about three hours early multiple times in the beginning of the semester.
Lousteau said there are normally three permanent supervisors in the shop, a foreman and two faculty supervisors. These faculty members leave the shop around 7 p.m., and student monitors watch the shop until 10:30 p.m.
Lousteau said the problem stemmed from a lack of student monitors available to watch the shop early on in the semester. The monitors are present for safety issues.
Shop technician Don Colvin said the shop isn’t guaranteed to be open after the faculty leaves. He said the monitors are present for the students’ safety, and if a monitor isn’t present once he leaves the shop around 7 p.m., the shop will close early.
Lousteau said the problem has since been fixed.
Gauthreaux also finds fault with the student monitors, who are often younger than the senior engineering students and don’t know how to operate the more advanced equipment.
“All they do is sit there … pretty much babysit seniors in college,” Gauthreaux said.
He said the monitors also run on tight schedules and will force the groups to stop working in the middle of a task when the clock strikes 10:30 p.m.
“A lot of our group has jobs and classes,” he said. “We want to make sure everyone in our group is putting in work, and it’s hard to get a time when everyone is available.”
Lousteau, Gauthreaux and Colvin all agree that this year’s senior class is the largest they’ve seen.
Colvin said the shop used to stay open even without the presence of a shop monitor, but because of safety concerns involving the equipment in the shop, the school now requires a monitor be present.
Lousteau said he averages about nine to 10 hours a day in the shop working on his project, which has an earlier deadline than most projects.
He said the missed shop hours earlier in the semester haven’t set him back too much.
“We just have to work harder now,” Lousteau said.
 
 
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Contact Kevin Thibodeaux at [email protected]