2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Innovative Professional Master’s Capstone to Bridge the Gap Between Academia and Industry

Presented at College Industry Partnerships Division (CIP) Technical Session 1

In the 21st century global industry, corporate recruiting managers often recognize the gap in workforce development skills from the recent engineering graduates. Fortune 500 companies continue to spend millions of dollars for on-job training and rotational development program on their newly hires. At the university level, there is always a challenge to implement the engineering knowledge into industry practice and real-life product/process applications.

In the past two years, Purdue School of Industrial Engineering had developed a new MSIE-Professional Master’s Program to close this industrial gap significantly. We offer the MSIE-PMP degree program with multiple advanced engineering courses and the required 9-credit hours of industry sponsored capstone projects. The list of the industry sponsors has grown from 1 to 20 major global corporations over 2 years. On top of the regular 2-3 semester capstone projects, our PMP students have been given the opportunity to work for the industry sponsors as the summer intern and/or the co-op. Upon their MSIE graduation, they are equipped with 16-21 months of hands-on industrial experience.

In this paper, we will evaluate the training effectiveness of the conventional 4th year, senior design project in Industrial and Systems Engineering curriculum. The metric of the capstone design project effectiveness may include business impact to the sponsors, expected deliverables, client engagement relationship, overall efficiency, faculty involvement, and sponsor-student expectation. Besides, we will introduce this transformative engineering OpEx consulting model from Purdue to enrich in graduate education and workforce development that prepare our next generation engineering leaders. This innovative PMP educational model integrate with advanced engineering knowledge and industry-based business challenge. The outcome of this MSIE-PMP has bridged the gap and enables sustained engagement between industrial innovators and world-class academic institutions. It will minimize the common corporate training expenditure and improve the employee retention rate for top recent master’s engineering graduates.

Authors

Dr. Nga Hin Ben Fong Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE) [biography]

Ben Fong is the Director of the IE-Professional Master’s Program (PMP), Associate Professor of Practice in Industrial Engineering at Purdue University-West Lafayette. Since he joined Purdue in 2021, he has engaged over 20 major corporation for the IE-PMP Capstone program. Ben is a senior global product portfolio leader with 30 years of diverse experience in research and development, IoT product strategy, operational excellence, and commercial growth. He reported directly to multiple VPs of Global Product Management and was responsible for a variety of products Profit and Loss that worth USD $550M. He worked over 20 industrial sectors from 80+ U.S. and global facilities. Achieved over $100M in savings for multiple LSS Enterprise CI programs. Dr. Fong graduated with his MSME and PhD from Virginia Tech. He obtained his BSME from U. of Texas-Arlington. He is an IISE Fellow, a Registered P.E. (Virginia), a ASQ-Certified Quality Engineer, a Certified Six Sigma Black Belt (Caterpillar), and a DFSS-Master Black Belt (GE Healthcare).
Dr. Patrick Brunese http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-1009-2717 Purdue University at West Lafayette (COE) [biography]

Patrick A. Brunese is the Assistant Head of the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University. His focus is the development and operations of world-class programs to educate world-changing industrial engineers. His research interests include the design of transformable production networks and facility logistics; the connections between models, modeling, and decision making; engineering and intercultural education; and course and curriculum design. He teaches in the areas of engineering economics, production management and control, advanced facility design, and undergraduate and graduate level capstone design courses. He has also regularly co-coordinated study abroad programs. Dr. Brunese is a member of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, the Operational Research Society, the Industry Studies Association, and the American Society for Engineering Education.

Download paper (1.9 MB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session

For those interested in:

Academia-Industry Connections