Fostering university/industry partnerships through sponsored undergraduate design

Describes a mechanism for fostering a partnership between the university and industrial communities, with the aim of sponsoring undergraduate design projects. This paper addresses the contributions and commitments of the university and industrial participants, including financial arrangements, legal agreements, matching contributions, and research and design supervision and evaluation. Industrial partners sponsor real-world design projects which are supervised and evaluated by faculty and industry facilitators. Students benefit not only from the technical aspects of the project but from exposure to market and economic aspects, design limitations and environmental and legal factors. Students work both in the university and industrial setting. The participation of engineering professionals with the student design teams ensures that the project realizes both the industrial partner´s engineering and financial goals as well as assistance in evaluating the academic content of the project. Projects must be realizable in the academic time-frame, and this paper describes how projects such as alternative solutions, exploratory projects or lower-priority projects best fit the concept. A brief description of projects undertaken during the last two years for IBM, Duke Power Co., Ingersoll-Rand Compressor Division, Florida Steel Drum Co., and Siecor Corp. is presented. The financial obligations, legal boilerplate and intellectual property concerns are discussed. The final section presents lessons learned from the project and what future plans are for expanding the program