Virtual On line
June 22, 2020
June 22, 2020
June 26, 2021
Cooperative and Experiential Education
6
10.18260/1-2--34929
https://peer.asee.org/34929
394
Lindsay Corneal is an Associate Professor in the Padnos College of Engineering and Computing at Grand Valley State University. She received her B.A.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Windsor, a M.B.A. from Lawrence Technological University, and a Ph.D. from Michigan State University in Materials Science and Engineering.
Wendy Reffeor is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Padnos College of Engineering and Computing at Grand Valley State University. She earned her Bachelors from GMI Engineering & Management Institute, Masters from Purdue University and Doctorate from Michigan State University. Her industrial experience includes designing quality systems for Allison Engine Company in Indianapolis. Since joining GVSU, she has focused on introducing design and build projects in traditionally analytical courses in the Engineering Mechanics sequence.
Dr. Pung has interests in experiential learning, design processes and student teams.
The Grand Valley State University (GVSU) School of Engineering has a mandatory three semester co-op program. The addition of a technical writing assignment to the second of the three co-op semesters was implemented in 2016. Students are required to write a technical project proposal to address a problem they identify at their co-op employer. Because this project is proposed during the second of the three co-op semesters, the students were asked to identify a project that they could complete during their final co-op semester or a larger project that could be completed by a team of students for their senior project.
After this writing assignment was added to the co-op sequence, it was noticed that students were proposing some projects that had a lot of merit but that they were too complex for one student to complete within a single co-op semester. To support the overall curriculum within the GVSU engineering programs, the employers were encouraged to submit these proposals for consideration as a project for the industry sponsored capstone projects that all GVSU engineering students are required to complete. These multi-disciplinary projects are completed by teams of four to six students over the course of two semesters. Having a well-defined project proposal and a student that is familiar with the company, which the employer can request be a member of the team, leads to very successful capstone projects and allows more challenging projects to be undertaken.
This paper will present the background of the technical proposal writing assignment within the co-op sequence. The results of the assignment on the generation of sponsored projects for the capstone design sequence will be presented and discussed along with some examples of the types of projects proposed and completed.
Corneal, L., & Reffeor, W. S., & Pung, C. P. (2020, June), Linking Co-op and Senior Project: Technical Proposal Requirement Embedded in Second Co-op Rotation Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--34929
ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2020 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015