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Engineering students work on a magnetic shield system to protect astronauts on long interplanetary journeys. Photo courtesy College of Engineering

At the University of WisconsinMadison, engineering students take classes from professors whose innovative research unlocks the knowledge and technologies needed to create tomorrows advances.

Those students also have many opportunities to apply their engineering education to real-life challenges.

In other words, they learn engineering by doing it and in the process, they help people and acquire a host of other valuable skills.

Engineers Without Borders UWMadison students worked with locals in Zapote, Guatemala, to build a new water system that brings clean water down to the town from a nearby town. Submitted photo

Students get to work in teams, and they deal with real-life situations, including conflicting design ideas, team management styles, pressure from deadlines, and fabrication issues, says John Murphy, a faculty associate in engineering physics at UWMadison who is among the instructors for College of Engineering freshman design classes. The students interact with clients, and they must develop budgets, plans, meeting times, schedules, and formally go through a design process that optimizes a variety of potential solutions their team has brainstormed.

Reflective of the various disciplines within the College of Engineering, these client-based design projects vary widely, yielding everything from medical solutions and assistive technologies to process improvements and product analyses to building concepts and beyond. Often, prototypes are among the deliverables, which also include a detailed design report with drawings and a final presentation to the client.

Ultimately, the student teams have to understand not only the problem and accompanying physics, but also how to function as a real team interacting with a client, says Murphy.

Biomedical engineering student Megan Baier positions a plastic spine before the group pours the gel into the model.

He also says that students overwhelmingly enjoy a class that enables them to put their calculus, chemistry, physics and other knowledge to use.

It allows them to immediately feel what its like to be an engineer, he says. And, the freshman design class is a wonderful recruitment and retention tool for young engineers.

Engineering students at all levels of their undergraduate education acquire project-based design experience through their courses. They also can hone design, teamwork and leadership skills in many ways outside the classroomamong them, through participation in co-curricular activities such as engineering student organizations.

The College of Engineering offers more than 50 student organizationsseveral of which center around competitive design challenges (think: building a futuristic mode of transportation or a concrete canoe you can actually paddle) or service projects (think: partnering with a community to assess how green streets can alleviate runoff, or working with residents of a rural African community to design and construct a safe, sustainable school building).

The following are among several examples of the ways in which students are making the world a better place, making a positive impact on peoples lives, and engineering the futuretoday.

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Engineering students learn by solving real-world problems - University of Wisconsin-Madison