This paper examines how undergraduate work experiences affect engineering graduates' post-graduation starting salary, their cumulative grade point average upon graduation, and their likelihood of receiving a job offer prior to graduation. This study contributes to the field of undergraduate work experiences uniquely by taking into account academic performance prior to work experience, including the exact number of work experiences, and examining how gender interacts with work experience to affect the measured outcomes. The results show that more experience results in a higher post-graduation starting salary and an increased likelihood of a job offer prior to graduation. Increases in cumulative GPA upon graduation were only marginal. Furthermore, undergraduate work experience affected female and male students as well as students from different majors similarly.

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Discontinuously reinforced aluminum alloys are viewed as candidate materials for elevated temperature applications because of their attractive high temperature strength properties and wear resistance. The elevated temperature elastic properties and the failure characteristics in relation to the preform flaws, however, have not received much attention in spite of their potential significance. These issues are studied for an aluminum-silicon alloy reinforced with mullite discontinuous fibers, fabricated using the squeeze infiltration technique. The effect of preform flaws (shot) on room temperature strength and ductility is investigated for composites seeded with different amounts of shot. The Young's modulus of the composite exceeds that of the unreinforced alloy over a wide range of temperatures, and the beneficial influence of the fibers is especially significant at elevated temperatures. The primary contribution to the reduction in the modulus of the composite at higher temperatures is shown to be the degradation in the matrix stiffness. Reinforcing the alloy with mullite fibers results in only a moderate improvement in strength at room temperature but the elongation to failure is reduced considerably. Increasing the amount of shot, although not appreciably degrading strength, further reduces the ductility. Shot is found to play an important role in the damage evolution by fracturing early in the loading process, and thus, the composite integrity when subjected to slow stable crack growth, as in fatigue, for example, could be adversely affected.

The mechanical response of an impact-modified, discontinuous fiber reinforced styrene-maleic anhydride (S/MA) polymer has been characterized at static and high strain rates and under both dry and wet test conditions. Five different material configurations were tested, including unreinforced S/MA as a reference material and composites incorporating fiber reinforcement with different average diameters, the presence or absence of an interfacial silane coupling agent, and fibers prepared with an acrylonitrile/butadiene latex coating. The ultimate tensile strengths, strains to failure, fracture energies, and effective moduli for each of the materials were evaluated as a function of strain rate, which was varied between 1.67 × 10−3 and 6.0 mm/mm·s. The results of the tests performed on the unreinforced S/MA revealed a 60% increase in the ultimate strength and marked reductions of 80% and 50% in the strain to failure and fracture energy, respectively, with increasing strain rate. While all of the composites exhibited on the order of twice the strength, 2.5 times the stiffness, and less than a tenth of the strain to failure compared to the unreinforced S/MA, the dependence of these properties on the strain rate was much weaker. Significantly, the work of fracture more than doubled with the strain rate for all the composite configurations tested due to the comparatively small reduction in fracture ductility of about 25%. All of the materials showed some degradation in the mechanical properties when tested wet, a result that was particularly evident for the composites having no silane coupling agent which suffered about a 15% loss in strength and stiffness. A simple rule of mixtures calculation revealed that as the rate of testing was increased, more efficient reinforcement by the fibers was realized. Fractographic observations using a scanning electron microscope, viewed in conjunction with the experimental results, indicated that fiber debonding during composite deformation was limited by the inhibition of viscoelastic flow in the matrix material at high strain rates.