Cross-Cohort Research Experience for Project Management and Leadership Development

• Published in: Association for Engineering Education - Engineering Library Division Papers
• Main Authors: Lu, Yung-Hsiang, Hacker, Thomas J, Zoltowski, Carla B, Allebach, Jan P
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Atlanta American Society for Engineering Education-ASEE 26.06.2016
• Subjects: Collaboration; Colleges & universities; Competition; Curricula; Entrepreneurship; Graduate students; Leadership; Learning; Professional development; Project management; Research projects; Skills; Software; Software development; Software development tools; Students; Version control; Videoconferencing
• DOI: 10.18260/p.26604

Project management and leadership skills are essential for career development. However, in typical university settings students take different courses, hence they work on different projects in different teams every semester. As a result, students lack opportunities to work on multiyear projects, and consequently miss opportunities to develop the skills essential for long-term planning. To remedy this situation, our department has created courses that allow students from all years (first-year students to graduate students) to work on research projects under the supervision of faculty members and the mentorship of senior graduate students. These projects provide the opportunities for students to learn many skills essential in the workplace, such as (1) understanding how projects are designed and managed; (2) taking responsibilities on different components in the projects; (3) learning computer tools for collaboration and integration; (4) developing leadership skills; (5) cultivating self-learning; and (6) improving communication, both speaking and writing. This paper reports one project that involves undergraduate, master, and doctoral students. The project, now in its fourth-year, builds computer tools for researchers, educators, and students. The project has received an award in a student competition, and three grants for international collaboration, entrepreneurship, and big data analytics. This paper describes the project in detail and shares experiences on many crucial factors in creating a successful cross-cohort research project. Research experience is not required in the standard curriculum followed by many programs; thus, is is essential to recruit well qualified and interested students. From the beginning of this project, there was a clear goal to create software tools that could be made available to the research community. The opportunity to serve real users is appealing to many students. In order to build software tools for users, this project has established rigorous procedures common in commercial software development such as version control, testing, documentation, and so on. Leadership development is another key component: if a student continues in this project, the student may be promoted to lead a subteam or the entire team. In addition to learning technical skills, the team has participated in multiple student competitions and has won the second prize in one competition. This project also encourages entrepreneurship: a group of students have been interviewing potential customers exploring the feasibility of commercializing the technology. Three foreign institutions are collaborators of the project and the students have experience working with these collaborators through video conferencing.