Potentials - May/June 2017 - 34

After several years of personal involvement with
student projects, it became apparent that projects
involving guidance from an experienced
professional had higher completion rates and
possessed the qualities of a more finished or
polished product by the end of the semester.
a question could not be answered by
the EiR volunteers, we quickly polled
the IEEE membership. From the more
than 900 Members in northern Colorado, we always found someone who
was willing to help.

the starting line
Our first semester started out slowly-
some volunteers had intermittent
contact with students throughout
the time. We did a quick survey of
over 300 students and found out

eir volunteers Scot heath and Sam Babb help ece students Darrin minnard and andrew Sullivan simplify a project design.

ece senior erin karasz and eir volunteer richard toftness review an early model of
karasz's snowflake-sensing system.

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May/June 2017

IEEE PotEntIals

that the visibility of our program
was very low, but students that had
contact with EiR engineers were
really enthusiastic about the interaction. So we quickly performed presentations to classes and designed a
set of humorous posters that were
displayed in the engineering building hallways.
We also statistically analyzed the
door openings of the electronic access to the ECE projects lab. The EiR
office is within the ECE projects lab.
Door openings were used as a proxy
to better understand when students
were in the lab area. We found out
that no students used the lab before
11 a.m., even on the days we were
not present and traffic to the lab was
still heavy at 4 p.m. It gave us an unbiased quantitative measure of student availability. With this data, we
adjusted the schedules of our volunteers. The reaction was immediate,
with student contact increasing from
21% to in excess of 60%. Since that
time, student contact continues to
grow and their reactions to our EiR
volunteers remain outstanding.
"While our education gives us the
tools we need to figure out engineer ing problems, we appreciate the
perspectives and advice of the EiR
volunteers," says Erin Karasz, senior
electrical engineering student, in
CSU's Source publication. "They have
gained more experience and wisdom
than we could possibly have, and they
help us see the big picture."
Karasz is one of five students working on a snowflake-sensing system
with the goal of creating more accurate winter weather predictions.
Karasz and her team reached out to
EiR volunteers for general project advice and feedback on current technologies used in the industry.
Electrical engineering students
Andrew Sullivan and Darrin Minnard have also capitalized on the
EiR program. Sullivan and Minnard contacted EiR volunteers Sam
Babb, a retired engineer from HewlettPackard, and Scot Heath, director of
engineering for Enabled Energy, for
advice about the high-voltage electric system in their mini, Indy-style
electric car project.

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