International Senior Design: Assessing The Impact On Engineering Students After Graduation

Since the year 2000, Michigan Tech has administered capstone senior design projects for engineering students that allow them to obtain six credits working on an engineering project in the developing world. This paper provides information on the first phase of a long-term assessment, to begin analyzing the impact of our International Senior Design (ISD) program on young practitioners after graduation. Our contact with program graduates suggests that the ISD experience has a larger impact on a student’s professional practice compared to traditional senior design projects. We are currently implementing a more rigorous assessment program to evaluate this assumption. In this paper, we initiate Phase I of our assessment program by presenting our plan to track graduates from the ISD program that are currently in graduate school, or employed in private engineering practice, K-12 education, and government. Phase I provides some preliminary evidence that our initial assumption about the impact of the ISD program on engineering graduates may be correct. In the second phase of our assessment program we will perform a more detailed assessment to quantify this assumption.