UChicago Molecular Engineering major Maya McDaniel said one of the final courses in her fourth year didn’t just show off her skills, but helped her gain new ones.
McDaniel was part of a team working on motion sensors for sink applications as part of the Engineering Design capstone course. The course, a requirement for all Molecular Engineering majors, has students design real-world products under the guidance of industry mentors, helping them bring their skills from the classroom to the real world.
“This immersive experience ensures that they graduate not just with theoretical expertise, but with the ability to navigate complex engineering problems and experience in interacting with industry professionals,” said UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Director of Experiential Learning Mustafa O. Guler, one of the course’s four instructors. “While developing technology in the laboratory bench is important, the ultimate goal of engineering is to solve practical problems in a way that benefits society.”
For McDaniel, it was a chance for a chemical engineer to refresh and build on her electrical engineering skills.
“I’ve done all sorts of things in my time at UChicago, but I always focused on the materials engineering and physical chemistry front,” she said. “And then I got here, and I had to build some advanced circuitry. The most that I had done before this was building a little breadboard to make a servo motor run. I hadn't done anything sort of on this scale.”
She said a practical, hands-on course like the Engineering Design capstone reminds students that engineering is, at its core, interdisciplinary.
“It really was a learning process,” she said. “Electrical engineering is a really helpful skill to know and now I have that going forward in my career.”
The partnership, several of these mentors said, goes both ways.
“When the opportunity to be involved with the University of Chicago presented itself, we jumped at it,” said mentor David Wildfield of Skyline Design.
Wildfield described his role as helping direct the research at the start and adding real-world application advice on how to use the research in order to aid in test protocol development. From there, he watched and helped shepherd the “motivated and intelligent” students as they took the research and design in new, creative directions.
“You can learn a great deal from student projects if you stay open to the process,” he said.
UChicago Medicine radiologist Ken Bader helped mentor two projects: one on ultrafast ultrasound imaging signal processing and one that was coupling the therapeutic source to the body. He said courses like this – part of UChicago PME’s commitment to interdisciplinary research – help bridge the too-common gap between engineering and medicine, bringing the disciplines together to help save lives.
“I gave the students a lot of rein to be as creative as they wanted,” Bader said. “And I felt they did a really nice job doing that. In one case, one of the groups wasn’t getting the results they wanted and had to pivot a little bit. This can be frustrating for anyone, but they took it very much in stride and continued forward, focused on the task at hand. I was very happy with the outcomes.”
This creative, interdisciplinary approach to engineering and eye toward real-world applications are hallmarks of UChicago’s Molecular Engineering program.
“For example, one team, drawing inspiration from the microfabrication techniques learned earlier in the molecular engineering curriculum, developed an innovative and effective solution using a microfluidic platform,” Liu said. “Throughout the capstone experience, our students further build their problem-solving, communication, and other essential skills, preparing them for future success.”