Welcome: Senior Design
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Faculty Sponsors

Request for Faculty Proposals

Do you have an idea for a Senior Design project? Could your research benefit by having a team of engineering students work on your project for two semesters, with funding?

Projects should involve teams of 4-6 engineering students (and other appropriate disciplines) who work for two semesters (Fall-Spring or Spring-Fall-Spring) to design, build, and test a functional prototype (device or process). To review previous MSD projects click here .

New projects start each fall and spring so proposal deadlines are as follows:

Project Guidelines:

  1. Should be “multidisciplinary” (at least 2 engineering disciplines). A diverse team provides the best learning experience but this is not mandatory. Projects that utilize students from other colleges are encouraged.
  2. Anticipated team size should be 4-6 students.
  3. Anticipated workload should be consistent with two 3-credit lab courses.
  4. Purely experimental projects with analyses that generate reports are not adequate for Senior Design. Since this is a design experience, students must have the opportunity to design, build, and test something at the end of two semesters.
  5. Should not require students to sign nondisclosure agreements or forfeit their intellectual property rights, to avoid handicapping students as they enter the job market. Students must also put their documentation on a public website. Some material may be stored in a “private” area but we prefer to minimize this practice.
  6. We are most interested in supporting groups of related projects. For concurrent projects this means that we like to have several projects based on the same platform or projects that tackle different elements of a larger system. For serial projects this means that projects should build upon one another. Multiple iterations tend to produce stronger results for faculty.

Use this template and skills checklist for a first draft of your proposal, and submit electronically to Beth DeBartolo. Our Project Review Team will work with you to complete a final draft.

Completing this is a non-trivial exercise because we want to be sure that the project scope is appropriate and the needed skills are reasonable for seniors. To do so means that you should think about some design options (concepts) so that we can create a list of key tasks and required skills. See the “Detailed Project Description” section for more information. For a comprehensive proposal example, click here.

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