EPICS Fall 2007 Callout
Come and join us Monday, October 1, ARMS Atrium at 6:00 pm.
We would like to invite you and your students to our Fall 2007 call out for Spring 2008 registration.
We will have current EPICS students
and staff there to answer questions.
EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) is a service learning program
that was initiated at Purdue. Undergraduate students in engineering and other
disciplines earn academic credit for long term team projects that solve
technology based problems. They learn how to interact with each other and with
customers in deploying a product for a local community agency, and how their
expertise can directly benefit even the most disadvantaged members of the
community.
EPICS offers students the opportunity to gain real world experience while
working on real problems and is open to most majors at Purdue University. In
some schools it fulfills a technical requirement, in others it is an elective
that fulfills a graduation requirement. We offer the course for 1 or 2 credits
and would like for students to commit to taking it for at least two semesters.
EPICS offers the following unique features:
o Emphasis on long-term design experience. Most of our projects take several
semesters to complete.
o Teams are vertically-integrated. Each team is a mix of freshmen, sophomores,
juniors and seniors. They have the opportunity to grow into technical and
organizational leadership positions by the time they graduate.
o Projects are multi-disciplinary. All students gain appreciation of other
disciplines and expertise.
o Existence of a true customer. Each team is paired with a local community
organization to solve real problems. EPICS students gain skills:
o
Communication skills. EPICS projects require written reports, oral proposal
presentations with sponsors and consultants.
o Analytical
thinking. The larger and complex projects need cross discipline solutions.
o Teamwork. Students learn to accomplish tasks in a large, diverse team environment.
o Professional ethics. To successfully complete the project students must
maintain an awareness of ethical principles while meeting the demands of the
project.