The UTEP Engineering Innovation and Leadership (E-Lead) 9-month Capstone Senior Design Project is a much deeper project than a typical senior capstone. Our E-Lead teams will work on significant projects for an industry sponsor for their full senior year. The projects are in the category of what we’d call “Class II” for a company: not your critical path projects, but projects that have good potential upside if only you had the time or people available to look into them, such as product enhancements, manufacturing challenges, user interface improvements, possible new products that need exploration, etc. 

The project is modeled after the “SCOPE" Senior Design Teams at Olin College in Boston. As a result, the processes implemented within E-Lead Senior teams can have a substantial impact. E-Lead Senior Design entails a significant commitment from the students (a full-year course with substantial internal and external deliverables), from the sponsor (a liaison to interact with the team), and from UTEP’s E-Lead program (a strong structure in place to support the teams; each team has a faculty advisor, bi-weekly design reviews, project management training, workspace, budgets to purchase materials, full use of the machine shop and support, etc.).

For an example of past projects, please visit here.

Senior Design is divided into two semesters: fall and spring. During the fall semester, students must perform a significant amount of Ideation work to help explore possible and varied solutions to the problem. This ideation time may also include discussing customer needs and helping define the customer segmentation space. This time also provides our students with weekly interactive time for in-depth discussions with their industry mentor.

At the conclusion of the fall semester, in concert with the agreement of the company mentor, the student team will converge on a design idea. That idea will be taken forward into the spring semester for students to work on developing the design and making a working prototype.

Keep in mind that while the only promised deliverable to the company will be a detailed report, we will push hard to deliver a working prototype.