Many students in the engineering Senior Design Program have criticized the long hours and lack of organization in the Senior Design classes at NC State.
The Senior Design Program is a mandatory year-long commitment where teams of students in the same major can create a product and in some cases, market the product to companies. Various companies and organizations can sponsor certain projects.
Cameron Howard, a fourth year studying electrical engineering, said that while she likes her sponsor, the Poe Center, it demands a lot of time from her on top of her already-busy schedule. Howard and her team are making 3D models of the female reproductive system to better educate children about female anatomy.
“I think that the Poe health center does do good things, but they’ve asked us to make six models,” Howard said. “Once we get the hang of making the models it might go by faster, but basically this past week we made one model, and it took an entire week to do so. I get it’s also for a class and we’re getting a grade for it but I have other things to do. I can’t spend a full 15 hours every week on just senior design if I’m not being paid for it.”
Shadia Taylor, a fourth-year in bioprocessing science, said that the time commitments can vary depending on the project. Taylor estimated that she spent 10-12 hours per week on her own project: scaling up fluorescent proteins to make two liter bottles of the proteins.
“Since we’re using a bioreactor it can take us like, five-to-six hours at a time,” Taylor said. “I don’t believe that other groups are spending that much time.”
In the program, students usually spend the first semester learning from professors and the second semester creating their product, according to Howard.
Graham Whitehouse, a fourth-year in biomedical engineering, said there seems to be no collaboration between professors nor consistency in the sophomore and junior design classes.
“Those [classes] aren’t really organized to be a cohesive linear progression,” Whitehouse said. “It’s kind of frustrating that there doesn’t seem to be collaboration across the three, but to their credit, the entire curriculum is being overhauled and my class was the guinea pigs of that overall process … There’s a lot that we could have learned in a junior design class that would have been test-based and we could have really memorized these pathways.”
Howard suggested that Senior Design be one semester instead of two due to the lack of work in the first semester.
“In the first semester, I feel like it was very slow and we didn’t really do anything, and this one is like, I feel like every time I can catch a breath for Senior Design, something new pops up, or somebody asks me something else to do,” Howard said. “So, I definitely feel like if it were to continue, it could definitely be decreased to one semester. We had to do these weird reports first semester that did not help me at all.”
Whitehouse said he feels that students who partner with companies on their projects have more of a chance to be exploited for their work.
Sarah Novitt, a fourth-year studying electrical engineering, said her team could decide for themselves if they wanted to market their product, which was a tracking device specifically to help parents keep track of children in amusement parks. While Novitt chose not to pursue marketing her prototype, one of her team members did, and she will get money from sales.
While there are complaints, Whitehouse added that the time put into their projects were worth the benefits.
“We’ve learned a lot as we’ve progressed throughout the semester,” Whitehouse said. “The whole project is a yearlong so it’s hard to see how things develop and it’s kind of intimidating to begin with, but we break it down into really small increments. I realize now that I’ve learned a lot throughout this entire design process.”
