A College-Industry Research Partnership on Software Development for Undergraduate Students

Collaboration means working together for a special purpose. When industry and academia collaborate, their purposes may be very different, e.g., academia focuses on education and theoretical research, and industry in general focuses on products and process efficiency. Therefore, it is not easy for faculty members in engineering programs to find collaboration projects that represent a win-win situation for both industry and academia. Such projects can represent a major contribution to the education of our engineering students. In this paper, we present the case of an on-going college-industry research partnership on software development and testing. The students involved in this partnership are undergraduate students from the electronics and telecommunications engineering technology program at Texas A&M. The industry sponsoring this partnership is the IP Communications Business Unit at Cisco Systems, which develops the software for voice over internet protocol (VoIP) systems, such as IP Private Branch Exchange (IP-PBX) systems or call managers.