the air

I think it is a challenge for me to even begin to discuss with you how busy I am this semester due to senior design. My senior design project is with Caterpillar and requires me to mainly evaluate their process flow after painting till the final product is handed over to shipping. Overall, the process is fairly intuitive to understand, but it does require lengthy data mining/analysis to come up with reliable numbers.

What is senior design?

Senior design is a semester long project driven course. In this course, there are no exams or assigned homework. Rather, you are given a project that requires you to work with a company to resolve any of the issues they have. Needless to say, any of the issues you will resolve will be related to your field of study; so they will not make you fetch coffee. Your final grade for this course rests with how well you deliver a mid-term presentation, a final presentation, and a final report. Moreover, your group members will evaluate each other as well as the company providing feedback on your group as a whole. Ultimately, upon the completion of senior design, you are pretty much ready to graduate as it is generally the final course in your field of engineering.

Are there plant visits required?

At NIU, all senior design projects for engineering are sponsored by a company and requires extensive plant visits. That means, you will spend anywhere from eight to twenty hours per week at a plant collecting data. However, this phase is only temporary as most groups will meet on campus once all the data has been collected.

What are the effects of senior design

Let me put this frankly, if you are taking senior design, the hell with all your other courses. You cannot think that senior design is not important because if your professor feels you did not make a worthwhile effort, he/she can simply fail you and prevent you from graduating. The word is that senior design takes first priority over every other academic course. Just last week, I had an exam that I really needed to study for, but I could not find time to study for it nor make time because I needed to finish my data analyzing for senior design. In fact, there may be days where you will not be able to sleep much because of your project. The end result is that you have very little time to do anything enjoyable. Hence, that is the reason why I have almost no time to update this blog. This process will be like this until mid-December when I am complete with this course.

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