Our Gator Engineers benefit from industry engagement and involvement in the classroom. Be it through guest lectures, industry-based projects, or participation in design team challenges, our industry partners help ensure that students have a full appreciation of how to bring engineering theory into practice.

Class Engagement

Often our faculty maintain relationships with industry representatives who can guest lecture and speak on how course material is applied in the real world. Guest lectures who can provide that professor of practice insight are critical to our students educational experience. Beyond courses in specific technical areas, the Engineering Innovation Institute and Engineering Leadership Institute often seek guest lecturers for their courses to help emphasize how critical soft skills in areas like effective communication, creativity, and project management are harnessed to drive innovation.

Design Teams

Experiential learning is when students have the opportunity to work on real-world design challenges that require them to use their technical know how in a hands-on, real-world environment, complete with fiscal limitations, timelines, and constraints. Design teams provide our students with tangible learning opportunities that better enable them to develop an appreciation for a systems mindset. These challenges create opportunities for students to fail fast, adapt, iterate and learn. Industry can engage with students working on any number of student design teams. For a detailed listing of design teams and student organizations please visit our student organization page.

Capstones

Capstone courses provide a for-credit opportunity for students to work on a real-world, company-defined problem and use the knowledge gained throughout their academic experience to develop a solution or complete a specific project to successfully complete the capstone course. These projects, unlike design challenges, reply on industry-provided problems and projects. They typically have a clearly defined scope of work and clearly set deliverables. The faculty work with the company to set expectations for students and to help advance the projects. There are opportunities for both departmentally-based capstones as well as our interdisciplinary, college-wide capstone – Integrated Process and Project Design (IPPD).

For further information and to discuss the best way to assist your corporate needs, please contact:

John “Trey” Womack
Assistant Director, Engineering Extension and Outreach
Email: j.womack@ufl.edu
Phone: 352-294-6961