Picking a Senior Design project and team can be a stressful experience for everyone involved. It takes weeks of looking through possible projects, consulting professors, deciding on team members, finding sponsors, and much more. That is why one group of seniors is building a dedicated senior design website to streamline the process.
Laura Oliveto, Alyssa Chipelo, Thomas Slook, Caroline Squillante, Nicole Hilden, Michael Gaspari, Kevin Hockenjos, and Robert Weiss make up a team of students in the School of Systems and Enterprises working on this project.
The website is designed to show rising seniors possible projects for which they can sign up. The listed projects will only be ones that professors have already approved and uploaded to the website themselves. It will also allow groups and students to see which projects have already been filled and what is still available. Finally, the team said it could help encourage cooperation between different engineering departments, since right now a large percentage of projects are comprised entirely of students from the same major.
The group said they were inspired to choose this project due to their own experience getting organized, and the suggestion of their advisors Professor Gregg Vesonder and Professor Eirik Hole. They had initially set out to work on another project, focused on healthcare, but a few weeks later discovered that “Another group from the ECE department was actually assigned to the same exact project as we were and we weren’t even aware of this other team until about 2 weeks into the semester. After our initial sponsor meeting we concluded that there wasn’t enough material for two teams to need to work on the project,” Hilden said. It was at this point that Vesonder informed them of the previously-attempted goal to centralize the senior design process. They jumped on the idea. Of this experience, Slook said, “There was incentive from us not only to find a new project, but we fell in some of the holes that are in the senior design process, and we jumped on the project realizing we could fix some of these problems.”
The project has been tried twice in the past, once by a group comprised entirely of Engineering Management students who struggled with the technical challenges of the task, and again by a group comprised entirely of Computer Science students who struggled with the organizational challenges. In this group, conversely, three of the students are Engineering Management majors, while the other five are all Software Engineering students, providing the healthy mix of skills needed for the task.
While the group has made significant progress on building a website from scratch, they said that a few key delays will force them to pass completion of the project onto a group of rising seniors. Specifically, they said that getting the website to use the universal myStevens username and password, rather than a unique registration system, caused the project to take longer than expected. They also said that they had to spend more time than expected to gather requirements from professors to ensure that the system met all of their needs, since many professors already had established systems for placing students and were skeptical that the website would be more effective.
Of the group, Vesonder said, “They’re a terrific team.” The team will be presenting their progress on the website at the Innovation Expo on Friday, May 3, 2019.
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