2024 Senior Design Meet Your Team Event

Every week from now through April 2025, engineering & computer science seniors will meet with their teams and advisors on their Senior Design projects. The course kicked off Sept. 4 with a "Meet Your Team" event in the Hemmingson Ballroom.

"Today is the beginning of what I see as an exciting year ahead, with a lot to look forward to," said Interim Dean Jennifer Shepherd in her opening remarks.

The 2024-25 group is divided into 47 teams of three or four students. The projects and teams were curated through the Academic Director, Ted Zhang, and a Capstone Committee of five full-time Gonzaga faculty members.

Each team works with a sponsor, a faculty advisor, and a Design Advisor Board member. The experience gives students a chance to apply what they've learned in their first three years at Gonzaga and apply it to real-world challenges. The team structure, plus working with a sponsor, help develop the necessary tools to succeed in the work force.

The Meet Your Team event was the first time students saw exactly which classmates are on their team. Over a taco-bar dinner, their sponsor gave an overview of the problem to address and some of the project's parameters. The teams now begin to decide the scope of their solution, data they need to research, and the starting points for the solution's design.

The teams will prepare four project updates and present one near the end of each quarter to an audience of sponsors, project advisors, and members of the Design Advisory Board -- a collection of almost 60 engineering and computer science professionals who volunteer their time to ask clarifying questions and offer practical advice.

The students' final presentation is the Design Expo, which includes a public poster session near Bulldog Alley the final Wednesday before finals week (April 30, 2025).

"I'm looking forward to the Design Expo in April, and finding out all the interesting problems you're going to solve along the way," Shepherd said.