Opportunistic Engineering – A Student Project That Keeps on Giving

Final Paper pdf 496KB

Last year we authored a paper describing a unique opportunity to develop a summer internship program at Mercer University. This successful program teamed small groups of students with faculty to address either a research topic or engineering project. The name of this internship program is the “Mercer Summer Engineering Experience, or MeSEE. In this paper we describe the MeSEE project we directed with four summer intern students.
The problem we were addressing was improving the registration process for our freshmen engineering students. Specifically, we were trying to address the challenge of creating viable Fall schedules for our Freshmen from the thousands of possible schedules. In addition, we were also attempting to obtain the best schedules for our students while competing against other schools to fill common classes.
This paper describes forming the team of students, the solution approach, and the final engineered product. What took two and half days of frustrating work for two schedulers for the Fall 2014 freshman class, took approximately three hours for four schedulers when registering the Fall 2015 class. The Fall 2016 registration process repeated the performance of 2015.

Author(s):

Scott Schultz    
School of Engineering
Mercer University
United States

Pablo Biswas    
Engineering
Mercer University
United States