Senior design in the setting of multidisciplinary research
- Autores: Timothy Johnson, R. T. Cole, J.W. Hutchinson, S. R. Quint, C. W. Barton
- Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 23, no. Extra 3, 2007, págs. 570-581
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
-
Resumen
Multidisciplinary research projects in biomedical engineering (BME) may require undergraduate students to perform in areas where they have limited exposure or on tasks that challenge their emergent engineering skills. However, an undergraduate's inexperience can be offset and the likelihood of project success can be improved with careful selection of faculty and graduate student preceptors. Unfortunately, overtaxed faculty mentors, especially in today's competitive medical and academic centres, often are inaccessible or reluctant to mentor if time commitments and outcomes are uncertain. Thus, we proactively restructured the typical mentoring hierarchy in a top-down manner by pooling two bioengineering faculty, a clinician scientist and a senior graduate student to mentor one undergraduate. Our approach generated a project that fulfilled educational and research objectives. Participants reported satisfaction with project outcomes, their role in the process and the mentoring paradigm employed. We believe that alternative mentoring models for multidisciplinary BME research projects should be employed when establishing senior design experiences and that superior results are achieved when equal weights of effort are expended in defining the composition of the mentoring team as well as in defining the project itself.
