Work in Progress: Senior Design Day – Multi-discipline and Multi-department Capstone Presentation Event.

Senior Design or "Capstone" projects are one of the most important aspects of undergraduate activity in engineering disciplines as they represent a culminating major design experience with multiple constraints. Most students enroll in capstone courses during their senior year and participate in team-based design of a system or component. Capstone activities include requirements gathering, specification development, technical design and troubleshooting, oral presentations and written reports. At the end of each Fall and Spring semester, Texas State University Ingram School of Engineering hosts "Senior Design Day" to showcase the projects and student accomplishments. Some projects are fully completed while others are halfway through the capstone sequence. Our event, hosted at a local convention center, includes presentations from teams from four disciplines with both engineering and engineering technology majors. The event is attended by students (both in the capstone class and those who have not yet taken it), faculty, sponsoring companies, industrial advisory board members, and members of the public. This is an evolving event that has changed significantly in the last four years, and now draws over 300 attendees. Multiple break out rooms host ongoing formal team presentations concurrently with poster presentations and corporate information booths. The day wraps up with a networking event for the students and companies in parallel with an industrial advisory board meeting. This paper will present the evolution of the event, logistics, and lessons learned via pros and cons. Index Terms – Capstone, Senior Design, Design Day, Senior Design Day.