Introduction

The senior project is an important experience for engineering students preparing for a career. The reason for its importance is that virtually all product development today is done by teams. These teams will have amazingly diverse personalities and training backgrounds. You will find that project teams can have as few as five or 10 people to hundreds of people. On these teams will be engineers with different training from different universities; they will not all specialize in the same thing. There will also be a large assortment of nontechnical people who are experts in areas that up until now may have been of little interest to you, such as marketing, program management, sales and market communications. As you grow in your career, you’ll find each of these roles valuable to the success of a product.

Some of the best advice I received as a brand-new engineer out of college was from a senior government employee to whom I reported. I was in the army, serving two years as a draftee. After about a year under his command, he asked me into his office. The topic of our meeting was mentoring, and he asked if I had thought of becoming a manager. My response was a firm “no,” as I enjoyed being an engineer and turning ideas into reality. His reply was interesting. He said, “Gene, some day you’ll have an idea that will take more than two hands to develop. At that point, you will become a manager.”

At this point, you may be trying to tie this story into useful information. Let me attempt to do that.

The purpose of a senior project is to gain experience working on a team. Fortunately, it will be with several other students whom you have known for three or four years and are comfortable working with. Or whom you think you are comfortable working with. If your team is like many teams you will encounter in an industrial setting, it will probably have one or two hard-driving individuals. It will also have one or two “lazy, not in a hurry, a C is good enough” individuals. It is with this team that you will have to complete your senior project. As with any team, you will also need a leader; one of your members will become that leader, either by election or by default. The success of your project will depend heavily on the choice of leader.

As the team begins to function, an important question will come to your mind: How do I get graded on this project? Over the years, I have asked professors how they determine the grade for each individual and received responses like, “we watch them closely” and “we ask the team members to rate each other.” I see neither as satisfactory answers. Simply put, teams should be graded as teams and not as individuals.

The purpose of a team is to become greater than the sum of its individuals. This effect has happened on several teams to which I've belonged. As we teamed up, two began to look like five and five began to look like 10 and 10 began to look like 30. I call it “jelling.” Somehow we became significantly more productive as a team than as a group of individuals. The team was never made up of all hard-driving, passionate individuals; this effect is possible even with a random mix of people.