This new program provides a critical multidisciplinary learning opportunity for engineering and business students to work on real-world industry projects under the direction of faculty and sponsor company mentors. Students will design, build, and test a real product or system while learning teamwork skills and how to complete projects on time and within budget.

Working in multi-disciplinary teams and following a systems engineering design process, students assess customer needs and engineering requirements; generate, evaluate, and select concepts; resolve major technical hurdles; and employ rigorous engineering and business practices to design and build a prototype device or process which is tested, fully documented, and satisfies client business needs.

All students participating in the Heath Integrated Business and Engineering Program will be participating in the IED program. All engineering and business students will have the opportunity to apply to the IED program to satisfy their senior design or elective coursework.

Interdisciplinary Senior Design

The EF437–438 course sequence is the hallmark of the Integrated Engineering Design program. The Interdisciplinary Senior Design (ISD) course features multidisciplinary projects financially supported by external corporations and agencies. Project teams are composed of engineering and business students.

A faculty mentor is assigned to each project and works in concert with a liaison at the client organization (typically an engineer). Students are onboarded in a fashion similar to starting a new job at a corporation. This process includes training in safety, preventing sexual harassment, implicit bias, intellectual property, export controls, effective meeting practices, collaboration tools, project management, and technical communications.

Project teams produce a series of technical and business deliverables in parallel with learning a systems engineering-based development process and honing skills needed for professional practice. All projects deliver preliminary, system-level, and final design reports with associated presentations. Faculty subject matter experts review the work of each team face-to-face. Each team demonstrates prototype systems in each semester. Projects include consideration of finances, with an expectation of a supporting business case and potentially a business plan.

This course sequence satisfies General Education requirements for Oral Communications (OC), Communicating Through Writing (WC), and Applied Oral Communications (AOC).