Senior Design Course Description, Industrial & Enterprise Systems Engineering, U of I

Objectives, history, achievements:

The Senior Design Project is an important part of every General Engineering undergraduate student's education. Teams composed of three students and a faculty advisor work on real-world projects submitted by industry partners. These projects are not only supported by industry, but the teams work closely with the partnering company over the 17-week term to:

     Define the problem

     Determine approach

    Perform calculations

    Work with vendors

    Perform or contract for necessary testing

    Build prototypes

     Write up and present the solution.

During the course of a semester, a team of 3-4 graduating seniors focuses on the particular problem proposed by the partnering company. Each team is supervised by its own faculty advisor. Besides being a direct benefit to the company, this unique course is a tremendous experience for our students who are about to graduate. It also provides our facility members with a regular opportunity to get closely involved with current industrial problems, making us more effective in the classroom.

GE 494 has been offered for 32 years; more than 700 projects have been completed with more than 200 partnering companies and organizations. The industries that participate in this program range from Fortune 500 companies to small manufacturing companies in Illinois with fewer than 100 employees. GE senior design projects are of such high quality that they have won 125 awards in national competitions. For more information about the awards, see the Sample projects Page.

Summer Internship:
We have had excellent results by integratin a summer internship with the project course. We can assist the potential Company in identifying one of our student for a summer internship. Then, if the Company decides to proceed with project Companyship, we assign their summer inter to the project team in the subsequent fall or spring semester. This strategy provides the kind of "running start" that has led to wonderful project outcomes.

Join Our Team:

Take a look a our history of successes. The program in the Department of General Engineering has an unusually high level of faculty involvement with project teams with highly focused, broadly capable students teams. Within this unique enviroment, we routinely accomplish the dual goals of educating our graduates and meeting the needs of our partnering companies and organizations.

Harry S. Wildblood
Coordinator
GE 494/IE 470: Senior Engineering Project

If you have engineering projects that you think may be suitable for this program, please contact me immediately. I am always eager to talk about potential projects for the course.

Harry S. Wildblood
Coordinator of Senior Engineering Project