{"id":143449,"date":"2018-11-06T10:39:40","date_gmt":"2018-11-06T15:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?post_type=school-college-post&p=143449"},"modified":"2018-11-06T10:39:40","modified_gmt":"2018-11-06T15:39:40","slug":"senior-design-resources-departmental-leads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2018\/11\/senior-design-resources-departmental-leads\/","title":{"rendered":"Senior Design Resources: Departmental Leads"},"content":{"rendered":"

In each engineering department, there is at least one professor who works as the designated Senior Design lead. The position doesn\u2019t come with any fanfare or reverence, yet this dedicated individual leads the department\u2019s Senior Design course, collects all of the projects, distributes those projects, and guides the students through their journey from beginning to end.<\/p>\n

For mechanical engineering majors, Professor Vito Moreno is just one of these professors.<\/p>\n

Moreno\u2019s job as a Senior Design lead starts even before the school year does. In mid-to-late June, Moreno and the other Mechanical Engineering Senior Design lead, Professor Brian Weber, start reaching out to companies, in conjunction with Director of Senior Design Business Development Charles Maric, to gauge which have projects they would like students to work on, and what exactly they need for those projects.<\/p>\n

\u201cMechanical engineering has a long history, where a majority of our projects are sponsored by companies,\u201d Moreno said. \u201cWe want to give the students a real-world experience and a transition by doing this.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of this preparation leads to a comprehensive list that details each project, what the sponsor is looking for, and expectations. Senior Design students are then given this list on the first day of classes and they have a week to decide which projects they are interested in. Moreno and Weber then match the groups themselves so that the students aren\u2019t just in groups with their friends.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you go to work you\u2019re not going to be able to pick who you work with,\u201d Moreno said.<\/p>\n

After the students have their projects, they are assigned a faculty advisor, but Moreno\u2019s role doesn\u2019t stop there. While he still advises some teams\u2019 projects, students still have a class component of Senior Design that meets twice a week. In the classroom, Moreno and Weber said he likes to focus on complementary information that will help them with their Senior Design project.<\/p>\n

Communication, oral presentation skills, and teamwork are just some of these supplementary skills that students learn throughout the semester.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe spend time talking to them about personality types and recognizing that people have a different perspective,\u201d Moreno said. \u201cPart of solving an engineering problem is one in which you appreciate the other person\u2019s perspective because they may be looking at the project different from you are and vice versa.\u201d<\/p>\n

The supplemental materials are meant to prepare the students for the ultimate goal in April: Demonstration Day. Students will hone their oral presentation skills by conducting two presentations in both the fall and spring semester.<\/p>\n

Throughout the first few oral presentations, Moreno said that students feel they should be presenting the absolute right answer, but this isn\u2019t the case.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about presenting your progress, and what you\u2019re learning, and how you\u2019re going to use that learning to go forward,\u201d Moreno said. \u201cAt the end, we expect to see the final answer, we don\u2019t expect to see one in October.\u201d<\/p>\n

Students seem to reach that final answer through trial and error in the spring semester, when their experiments are usually in full swing and usually not going as planned, since typically most teams first test runs always fail, Moreno said.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy response is welcome to the real world,\u201d Moreno said.<\/p>\n

\"Professor
Professor Vito Moreno at Senior Design Demonstration Day. (Christopher Larosa\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
<\/div>\n

However, overall, Moreno sees the mechanical engineering education as good preparation for Senior Design and ultimately the real world.<\/p>\n

The same sentiment was echoed by Professor Krystyna Gielo-Perczak, Senior Design lead for Biomedical Engineering.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey go through Junior Design, and we have certain courses that prepare them,\u201d Gielo-Perczak said. \u201cBut Senior Design is different because they need to make this product and place it on the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much like mechanical engineering, Gielo-Perczak said that biomedical engineering projects are also sponsored by companies, but Gielo-Perczak sees her role as more than setting up projects.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy main role [for students] is to facilitate, support and nurture, but not spell out needs,\u201d Gielo-Perczak said. \u201cBecause I\u2019ve known them so long, for four years, I see where they have talent and how valuable they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

And sometimes this support means knowing when her students need some extra support, and teaching team members to recognize this as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am showing and revealing even to my students that we need to be very flexible. If someone is stopping for a moment, let\u2019s raise him together,\u201d Gielo-Perczak said.<\/p>\n

Gielo-Perczak sees these breaks as part of the learning process that will prepare them for their engineering career, not as struggles themselves, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there is an incubation process, it is for everyone and there\u2019s nothing wrong with it. It is a part of the process,\u201d Gielo-Perczak said.<\/p>\n

As for the skills Gielo-Perczak believes her students learn, creativity is at the top of the list.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really would like to bring the program from STEM\u00a0through STEAM to STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine), and to make art (or arts) a creative component in the engineering design process,\u201d Gielo-Perczak said.<\/p>\n

Engineering skills, openness, problem-solving, and trying to overcome stressful situations are just some of the other many skills that students learn.<\/p>\n

\u201cMostly, they need to be aware that they are not alone,\u201d Gielo-Perczak said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In each engineering department, there is at least one professor who works as the designated Senior Design lead. The position doesn\u2019t come with any fanfare or reverence, yet this dedicated individual leads the department\u2019s Senior Design course, collects all of the projects, distributes those projects, and guides the students through their journey from beginning to end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":143451,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1866],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2110],"class_list":["post-143449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-engr"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-23 06:18:49","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143449\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/143451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143449"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=143449"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=143449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}