Completed Projects
Descriptions of our successfully launched initiatives
College of Engineering Undergraduate Website Reform
Engineering Initiatives worked with the Office of Communications to craft a new design for the College of Engineering website. A new website design is now being created by an outside company to create a professional, respectable design that will provide information efficiently to prospective students, current students, faculty, alumni, and friends.
Engineering Student Alumni Ambassadors (ESAA)
ESAA is a student organization that works with the College of Engineering Office of Development to plan and host events and programs to develop student-alumni relations. Through strong student-alumni ties, ESAA works to encourage involvement among alumni and increase awareness of this involvement among students. ESAA is working on special alumni events at Engineering Career EXPO, Engineering Open House, and Homecoming; a student-produced e-newsletter; and an alumni reception with student representatives in Chicago. Please see the ESAA website for more information.
Plasma Display for Engineering Hall
Engineering Initiatives worked with Samsung for an extended period of time to have this gift donated to the College of Engineering. This display in Engineering Hall serves to engage students in the activities that are occurring around the Engineering campus. Students, faculty, and societies of the College will have the opportunity to make media to be presented on this screen. The display has been recieved and, ideally, it will be up and ready for use by the beginning of the Spring 2007 semester.
Extended Weekend Hours for Grainger Library
Through the work of this initiative, Grainger Library has agreed to extend their weekend hours to 8am-9pm Friday, and 11am-3am Sunday.
FreshStart
The FreshStart web forum launched in mid June and was available to all incoming freshman engineers. This interactive medium provided these new students with fast and accurate data regarding the College of Engineering. A major benefit of this forum was that the information posted was dictated by student input. This indirectly serves the College of Engineering to discover which aspects of entering college remain the most confusing to new students. This project helped to not only improve the quality of orientation for the freshman, but also created cohesion amongst students before the academic year even began. This web forum was received with great praise and will be enhanced and re-implemented for future incoming classes.
Student Committees for Effective Classroom Teaching Incorporated into Faculty Workshop
A section on how to set up and run students committee will be included in the May 2006 teaching workshop provided by the Academy for Excellence in Engineering Education (AE3). A professor who has used committees successfully for several years will share his experience and an EI board member will provide the student perspective. By working with the professor during the semester, student committees can increase and improve communication between professors and students, give students the chance to feel like they are actively participating in the class, and to make the classroom environment one more conductive to learning.
Student Corporate Representative Program
Engineering Initiatives in conjunction with the Engineering Career Services (ECS) has enabled a new feature on the ECS website which enables student representatives for corporations to identify themselves and serve the students and societies in the College of Engineering better. This centralization will make the lives of many corporate directors for especially the smaller societies that do not already have a large contact base easier. The vision is that students have that have specific question that would be appropriate for a student to answer as opposed to the recruiter for the company.
RSS Live Update for the College of Engineering
Engineering Initiatives in conjunction with the Office of Communication for the College of Engineering has launched a live RSS feed that can be incorporated into any type of RSS reader. This will allow a constant update of what is going on in the college and its impacts nationally and internationally. We hope that all students in the COE incorporate this into their RSS readers so that they are always informed with the progress and impacts of our college.
Design Competitions
This initiative will be done by the Dean's Student Advisory Committee of Engineering Council. There will be student-faculty competitions during Engineers' Week of 2006.
Improving CITES
Resolutions regarding CITES' inability to meet the needs of the College of Engineering have passed the Illinois Student Senate and have been delivered to the Chief Information Officer, Peter M. Siegel. If CITES makes little or no progress and action toward meeting the needs of the College of Engineering, the Illinois Student Senate and the University Senate will take further action in this matter. COMPASS as of date has been partially restored and CITES is claiming to be performing 'constant' monitoring and upgrades though many students continue to experience significant difficulties during login.
