MTC Asset Newsletter Winter 2008

Students at TRB 2007: What They Learned

The MTC helps students fund their travel and attendance at the Transportation Research Board’s Annual Meeting. Following are a few Iowa State University students’ reactions to the experience.

Rebekah Bovenmyer

This was my first time at the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting. I attended presentations that helped me write articles for Go! and connected with people who might be interested in supporting the magazine.

Xudong Chai

I attended many sessions, especially in traffic operations and planning. One of the sessions talked about traffic safety and long-range transportation planning modeling. Listening to their presentations, visiting their websites, and reading their documents gave me fresh ideas about how to add new content to their research.

Eric Fitzsimmons

This year’s trip provided me the unique opportunity to meet with individuals and researchers that have experience in my proposed automated enforcement dissertation research. Furthermore, this trip provided me an opportunity to explore other areas of civil engineering including airport and railroad engineering.

Hillary Isebrands

The TRB Annual Meeting provides me more opportunities to learn and network each year I attend. This year I took on a new role where I am a committee member of the newly formed TRB Roundabout Task Force (formerly a subcommittee). I look forward to the opportunities and challenges that this responsibility presents for me in the future.

Cari Kinzenbaw

On top of the meetings and presentations, I had great networking opportunities with different professionals in the transportation engineering field. Some of those have resulted in interviews and job offers.

Matt Ludwig

I attended several interesting sessions. One was a poster session titled “Public Involvement in Transportation.” Another useful session was called “Transportation-related Right-of-Way Issues.” One specific part of this presentation that I was interested in was the particular ways to solve access management problems, ranging from creating private frontage roads to developing backage roads behind properties.

Christian Sax

One of the most exciting experiences I had at TRB came at the Eisenhower poster session. I met a student from Florida A&M who was presenting about breakaway objects in the clear zone, a topic that complements my own research.

While talking with him I met another student from the University of California at Berkeley who is studying the economic impact of increasing clear zone distances, another topic that complements my own research on the safety impact of the allotted clear zone distance. These students and I plan to continue to contact each other as we get more into our research in order to exchange findings.