The Senior Design three-course sequence is intended to simulate a professional work environment, to provide experience working in a group on an open-ended problem and to develop information gathering and communication skills. Substantial interaction between students, faculty and industrial and governmental institutions is an integral part of this experience.
Engineering students make up the majority of the senior design teams but the sequence is open to seniors in any discipline. During the fall the students form their teams, select an area of interest, then extract and explicitly state their design problems and methods of solution in formal proposals to the Design Faculty. The teams develop their own solutions during the Winter and Spring, the culmination of which is a formal report of the results. The faculty encourages the students to place as much emphasis upon the process of defining the problems and developing the solutions as is placed upon the actual end products. To reflect that concern, proposals, progress reports and final reports are required in both written and oral formats.
The Senior Design Final Presentations are our way of providing a forum in which the project engineers (the students) can communicate their results to the community.
Every year the departments nominate their best team to present at a college-wide Celebration of Engineering Design event.