Using a product engineering process to manage an introductory mechanical engineering program

"Discover Mechanical Engineering" (DME) is a student-run Freshman Pre-Orientation Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which, in the time since its inception in 2002, has developed into a popular, professional, and well-organized pre-orientation program MIT. Yet despite its success, it routinely experiences difficulties with respect to personnel and timeframes, both of which continually threaten the well-being of the program. It appears, however, that such difficulties are not a result of the students' motivational level, since all of DME's student volunteers contribute a great deal of time to the program. Rather, the problem may be that DME student leaders (and their supporting volunteers) are attempting to run the program prior to having taken MIT's Product Engineering Process course (also known as 2.009), a required senior-year mechanical engineering course which is expressly designed to teach students how to manage projects similar to DME. This course teaches tools most useful for the management of personnel and of time - the very areas which DME seeks to improve - through the use of Gantt charts, delineation of the project's critical path, and sundry other methods.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Laskowski, Christina Marie

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rohan Abeyaratne.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/32949

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/32949