Extending Electrical Engineering Research To Undergraduate Students Through A Multi Media Technology Internship Program

A means by which electrical engineering research can be effectively extended to undergraduate students through the use of a university-wide multi-media technology internship program is described. A group of ten full time students participated in the program over a period of ten weeks during the summer. Undergraduates were introduced to research through the task of developing electronic portfolios describing research programs associated with faculty members. This conduit created a one-on-one faculty-to-student interaction, which enabled an environment in which the student could begin to understand the essential ideas behind doing research at a university. In addition to engineering, a variety of other disciplines were represented, including chemistry, economics, and literature. Each student/faculty partnership approached the experience from different directions. This provided a unique atmosphere for an electrical engineering undergraduate student to learn about university research in a broader sense. The approach taken by the electrical engineering faculty/student partnership involved exposing the undergraduate to a small scale research project designed to reflect typical activities experienced by graduate students. The student went through the entire cycle of design, simulation, fabrication, and test of a working device prototype. Through this approach, the student experienced a microcosm of graduate school while interacting with graduate students, experiencing the difference between laboratory and simulation work, and developing technical writing skills through the development of the electronic portfolio.