Courses that offer experience working in a real-world environment are common throughout university programs. These courses provide valuable opportunities for students to network with industry professionals, and get a foot in the door that may help them with future employment opportunities.
Whether students are considering an undergraduate degree or a master’s degree in engineering, programs and schools that offer these courses can provide students with excellent resources.
One such course is offered at Oakland University’s School of Engineering and Computer Science, where Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) students leave their textbooks and classrooms behind to work on solving a real-world problem.
This ISE Senior Design capstone course regularly pairs groups of two or three students with local companies so the students can apply their education to solve real problems with process and workplace efficiency.
Students are required to meet with an instructor weekly, but they are also encouraged to do their own research to work out answers to any questions they encounter. The teams also write reports, document their design processes using engineering standards, and present their projects at the end of the course.
At the semester’s end, teams submit a final report to the sponsor company. They often also present their findings to the company’s representatives.
This past semester saw Oakland University ISE students Katie Folk and Adam Quinn in hospital wings with the staff of St. Joseph Mercy Oakland Hospital. Their project focussed on decreasing wait times for surgeons and their teams using specific operating rooms.
Folk and Quinn spent time at the hospital observing various processes from the end of an operation through to the beginning of the next one. They recorded and analyzed timing data throughout the processes. From this data, they could see how time was being divided between tasks during the turnover period between operations.
They also sought input from medical and housekeeping staff on ways to structure specific responsibilities that occur during operating room turnover, such as cleaning medical instruments, readying equipment, preparing patients, and more.
“We saw jobs happening in the operating room that could likely be done at the same time instead of consecutively,” said Folk. “We’re working with hospital staff to see if it’s possible to realign tasks to run in parallel.”
According to Quinn, the experience of working directly with a company has been empowering.
“It feels great to know that what we learned here at Oakland is significant and that we are readily able to use our skills to work with industry,” he said. “Having a class that involved real-world experience is always great, but a class that is basically contracting students out to do a project that we might do in a career is a unique experience that is highly valued.”
Robert Van Til, ISE department chair, said the senior design course usually entails a project developed by the company, where they are seeking a solution with an immediate impact on the issues they are facing. This means that each project is something that the company already wants to accomplish.
“This is an extremely important capstone experience that allows our ISE students to apply all the theory, concepts, tools and applications that they learn in various courses to a real-world problem in a real-world environment,” said Van Til. “Besides all the engineering aspects of these projects, the students are also working as part of a team from the sponsor company – St. Joe's in this case – and it requires them to use their soft-skills such as communications and teamwork.”
The ISE department has also partnered with companies such as General Motors, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Rayconnect Inc., DTE Energy, Crittenton Hospital Medical Center and Beaumont Hospital – Troy. All of these companies would provide excellent networking contacts that would be beneficial in the future, when these students are seeking employment.
For more information, visit the Oakland University Industrial and Systems Engineering Department.