Peer Advice: what senior design courses would you advise engineering students to take?

There are so many choices. What are the best senior design courses to take, when should they be taken, and why? Don't forget to say what is your major.

• I would really like to know what students think about EPICS. In particular, what are the reasons an ECE student would choose EPICs over a standard senior design course, and vice-versa. --Mboutin 12:24, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

• First I would like to clarify that VIP currently is an experimental course, and this is the main reason for which it can NOT be counted as Senior Design credits. But this may change soon. My knowledge about EPICS probably is not enough to compare VIP and EPICS fairly (I am the TA for VIP), so I will just present my opinion about VIP. VIP is a hands-on experience on which you can apply concepts from different classes such as 301, 438, 201, (just to name a few), and at the same time it challenges students to learn new concepts while developing solutions to real problems. Among its many selling points, I would say that the experience of working directly with one or two professors and a couple of grad students is what makes VIP special. In a classic classroom you "share" your professor and TA with 30, 40 or even more students, whereas in VIP the teams don't have more than 8 to 10 people. If you are interested or wondering about how grad school would be, then taking VIP is your first step. VIP teams are independent of each other and have different goals and grading philosophies, depending mostly on the leading professor(s), which is very much like grad school. Each team has regular meetings (usually weekly meetings) on which the students present the advances that they have made on the project, discuss its difficulties and obstacles, and receive feedback from the professors and grad students mentoring the team, which is again, very much like grad school. Probably I am extending too much so I will stop here. I’d recommend visiting our website for more information http://cobweb.ecn.purdue.edu/~vip/. --Mortz 3:34pm, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

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