Idaho Engineering Works

The IEW is composed of engineering graduate students working in diverse research fields that work with senior students to facilitate design, group work and manufacturing. The group oversees student shop usage, interacts with students and provides a model for education in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

The Idaho Engineering Works (IEW) began as a simple notion that there had to be a way to improve interaction between faculty and graduate students. Something more than an article for the faculty member and a graduate degree for the student should result from the educational process. The first lesson that the IEW learned was that it is not what you get that matters, it is what you give. From this lesson, the desired attributes of being people-oriented, team focused, and stewards of departmental resources were adopted.

An innovative model for developing leadership skills among graduate student mentors, senior design students, and even faculty, IEW started in 1994 as an informal group whose purpose was to develop an environment that fostered professional and technical excellence. Instead of focusing on the research or engineering hardware, IEW stresses human dynamics, communication, teamwork, personal reflection, and professionalism. By investing in the “human side” of engineering, professional and technical excellence can be more efficiently obtained.

To provide a context for the model, we focused our efforts on our capstone design sequence. Five years ago the IEW began teaching faculty and graduate students how to mentor senior design students. The mentoring included shop and CAD laboratory capabilities and CNC machining and solid modeling. The result has been an increase in the quality both of the students’ experiences and the products that have been developed.

from a paper by Edwin M. Odom, Steven W. Beyerlein, Blaine W. Tew, Ronald E. Smelser, and Donald M. Blackketter, Mechanical Engineering Department and the National Institute for Advanced Transportation Technology, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID.