EGR 390 Enrollment with Concurrent Co-op II Workplace Assignment
Getting Started
Unless this assignment is in a different department or location (which is a great idea to expose the student to many corporate facets and provide a steep learning curve), this should be similar to the Co-op I experience. Reference the Basics and Orientation sections from the first assignment, and apply as many items as needed for the new orientation. For each rotation, please include an individualized educational assignment plan with clear learning objectives and have it reviewed, approved and signed by all parties involved.
Content
The student should have some previous background and experience and should understand how to navigate the facility and who to contact with questions. The co-op student has also completed a semester of Upper Division engineering courses appropriate to their chosen engineering emphasis (biomedical, computer, electrical, interdisciplinary, mechanical or product design/manufacturing). The tasks assigned in the second semester should be increasingly more challenging with a higher level of responsibility. The workplace plan should be consistent the development in the student’s technical and professional engineering skills.
Project assignments should be considered and appropriately tasked with the proper scope and workload, according to the student’s preparedness and four-month, full-time availability.
During this semester, there are a number of potential assignments that expose the co-op to relevant technical areas where they can apply their developing technical skills. Some of these are manufacturing engineering, industrial/operations engineering, quality engineering, product engineering, and controls engineering.
A manufacturing engineering assignment exposes the student to a broad range of tasks which vary on a daily basis. The student might work closely with a product development team to help design robust, cost effective parts that can be easily manufactured and assembled. They could be assigned a role to improve existing processes or help design new ones with a requirement for quality and cost effectiveness. Floor support, with a focus on solving problems, process control and workplace ergonomics is a potential assignment. The student should gain a good dose of knowledge of how people, machines, tools and fixtures operate to manufacture your products.
An industrial/operations engineering assignment can require the student to be involved with optimization of the manufacturing plant’s ability to make products and meet the overall company’s goals. The scope of the student’s assignment could be focused on work cells, or individual product lines. Improvement of production methods, workplace layouts and production flow to increase profitability and productivity are typical goals. Development, installation and administration of production standards and work incentives to motivate teams towards company goals are also potential tasks. Students will work with a number of functions and levels of your organization to gain agreement and acceptance of ideas and plans that will achieve business goals.
A goal of an assignment in quality engineering should include exposure to all levels of quality assurance and control within the company. This experience should give the student understanding of the impact that each of the engineering disciplines have on one another, and on the company’s business goals. Tasks can include assisting product development teams with robust design methodology, customer issue resolution, product layouts, design of experiment applications and capability studies. Exposure to customer priorities for the company’s products can be obtained through customer site reviews of the product’s applications.
A work assignment within product engineering will expose the student to the company’s product development process, product lines, product functions and product performance criteria. Experience with the creative design process, a systematic approach to solving problems and an exposure to other functional areas, such as marketing, finance and manufacturing can be obtained.
An alternate product engineering assignment would have the student responsible for the design intent of a product line in production. Here the co-op would focus on improvements in the product’s profitability and quality by implementing product revisions, innovative problem-solving and minor product enhancements. At this level, students should be provided exposure to customer-related issues, as well as the manufacturing facility and personnel.
An assignment in controls engineering could be designed to have the student working on both hardware and software designs for automated equipment. At this leve, the student should be responsible for the start-up and debug of equipment they design, as well as offering process recommendations for the new equipment and support for existing equipment in production.
