2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Experiential learning has the potential to aid student understanding by providing opportunities for real-world applications. Typically internships related to the study area are means for achieving this goal. Unfortunately, not all students are able to secure an internship or undergraduate research experience. To provide an alternative we connected two core courses in our curriculum. We hypothesize that having peers to guide through the process
enriches the student experience. In this work, we combine the merits of peer mentoring with experiential learning to provide a novel interaction between the final-year students and the cohort below. The two courses selected for this experience were Capstone Design and Process Control and Safety. As part of the process control project, students enrolled, typically juniors are hired as interns working alongside the senior design teams. The recruitment process mimics the typical hiring process. Interested students submit resumes, and undergo interviews with all the design teams. Both parties submit preferences on matching, based on resume evaluation and interview outcome. Instructors for both courses utilize the information and optimize placement for both parties. The junior interns are provided with a unique project prompt by their respective mentor teams. The typical timeline for project completion is three weeks. The deliverables consist of a five to ten minutes video presentation of the work along with all the supporting documents (codes, slides, auxiliary files). The interns are graded (utilizing a rubric) by the mentoring design team and the two instructors. The categories for grading are: Content, Presentation, Effort, Interaction & Professionalism, and Cooperation. From the qualitative feedback received from both groups, interns, and design teams we conclude that students valued the opportunity to participate in a project prompt with real-world applications.

In the future, we will perform qualitative and quantitative evaluations of the effectiveness of this effort. We want to revise the timeline for the project to have more intermediate deliverables to keep both parties on track.