New ECE class gives students an in-depth look at the engineering process

Starting this semester, ECE ILLINOIS will offer students an opportunity to study the engineering design process and possibly get a head start on their Senior Design project with a new class called ECE 398, Special Topics in ECE.

The course was designed as a way for students learn and practice the engineering process before taking on their Senior Design projects. ECE Professor Paul Scott Carney said this class will cross many disciplines, and will teach students how they can apply their technical skills to solve problems. 

“The process of being an engineer is very much distinct from knowing a whole bunch of technical stuff,” Carney said. “It requires an approach and a method that ensures the success of big complicated projects. So, in Senior Design, we teach all of that. It’s a lot to cram. Our students do really well with it, but we felt that if we gave people a little more time to study in detail what they are getting into and what that engineering process is all about, then they would have better outcomes.”

The ECE 398 is a temporary course number given to new classes. Carney expects the class to be given a permanent number and name at the start of the Spring 2015 semester. ECE Professor Andrew Singer and Brian Lilly, an adjunct associate professor and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Technology Entrepreneur Center, are also teaching the class with Carney.

Students will spend the first half of the class learning the methodologies of project creation, evaluation, and the early planning stages. At mid-semester, students will have the chance to come up with their own project ideas. By the end of the semester, they should have a good design plan with which they can continue to work on.

Graduate student Ankit Jain (BSEE ’14), a teaching assistant for the class, said he wishes it had been offered before he took Senior Design last year. It would have alleviated a lot of the stress he experienced while working on his project for only one semester. He believes the processes taught in the new course will give students a good idea of the problems they’ll be asked to solve.

“I plan on telling them that they should always be realistic,” Jain said. “The design process shows them how to properly set goals, manage them, and accomplish them.”

Carney stressed that while ECE 398 does have an eye toward Senior Design, underclassmen and even students planning on not taking Senior Design are welcome to take the course because the skills taught are invaluable to anyone who hopes to work in engineering.

“There is nothing in ECE 398 that really requires a great deal of technical background,” Carney said. “The reason we are teaching it is because these (engineering) skills tend to sit alongside the technical skills that our students develop as they go through the program and are often less developed in favor of those technical skills.”

Students will be exposed to ways of identifying and analyzing problems. According to Carney, these skills can be applied to education and business, and the class will have the privilege of working with MBA students at the University Of Chicago Booth School Of Business. They will join the class mid-semester to help bring forward project ideas.

Carney believes students will not only be better prepared for their Senior Design projects, but for their careers as well after taking this course. Students will be able to apply their technical skills in the proper way after gaining a solid foundation on the engineering process.

“This class teaches a rigid process that allows students to be very creative and innovative, and yet know what they are doing. (It gives them) a real chance of success,” Carney said. “This is how the modern world works. This is how you put people on the moon or build giant particle accelerators.”