As the capstone of our bachelor’s degree programs, student teams tackle senior design projects—real-world challenges drawn from industry. Guided by faculty and professional mentors, they apply classroom knowledge to develop innovative products, systems or processes, culminating in the Senior Design Project Showcase.
These projects are made possible by companies that provide the challenges and benefit from our students’ fresh ideas and forward-thinking skills. The following testimonial case study from Becca Tiwet, president of VoxSomnia, highlights this powerful collaboration in action:
“Three of our four founders were NIU engineering students who had our own Senior Design project experience, so it was exciting to be on the sponsor side of the project this time.
To kick off the project, we had a training day with the students to introduce them to industrial controls and data acquisition. One of the benefits of teaching the fundamentals is that it forced us to clarify the project in our own minds; we hadn’t thought about specifications and outcomes yet! As the students asked more questions, we had to be clearer in our instruction about what facets of the project we’re trying to get insight about. That proved to be a productive exercise to reset our own design work.
VoxSomnia partners with clients in manufacturing to create custom test solutions that automate their product testing and data collection. The vision behind the project, the Universal I/O Checkout System™, was to create a portable, modular, and lightweight device that enables us to check a wide variety of signals with the controls hardware divorced from the final test program software.
The standalone device enables us to eliminate hardware signals as the culprit of any issues that arise during customer implementation testing. The project goal was to reduce project implementation time, allowing our customers to get production up and running an estimated one to two days sooner.
We met on a weekly cadence with the students and a faculty mentor. We’d take about 30 minutes to review progress, address questions and challenges, and then plan next steps. It created a strong structure that kept momentum going on the project. The simple act of students preparing for a meeting helped ensure the project advanced.
We also noticed that every social media post that we made about this project sparked higher engagement than our other posts. That tells us that there is not only interest in learning about the I/O Checkout System, but also that potential customers were thrilled with engagement that goes beyond selling VoxSomnia services.
Nowadays the churn of employees is very high. Companies are always recruiting. One motivation for us to do this was to support our long-term recruitment. Recruiters often require payment of up to 30% of an employee’s first-year salary. This project provided an eight-month exposure to evaluate potential employees and see if they are a good fit, while also giving us a physical end product through the project itself.
If we had the funding and were looking to hire someone, we would have extended a job offer to one of the Huskies we worked with.
In industry, it’s commonly understood that it will be at least one or two years before fresh grads provide significant value—it takes time, it takes coaching, and it takes mentorship. Senior Design kickstarts that process; it grows students’ confidence in practicing their skills, finding a job and gives them a great taste of what it’s like to work for an engineering company, or really in any corporate environment.
The program is a great way to get these young engineers to be willing to take risks, which is such an important quality in any field. Our experience was overwhelmingly positive—when the annual Senior Design project cycle from September to May aligns again with our opportunity for growth, we would absolutely want to do another one.”
To learn more about VoxSomnia’s Senior Design project, see the overview on the company’s website, Universal I/O Checkout System: NIU Senior Capstone Project.
Interested in learning more about how to become a Senior Design team sponsor? Contact Matt Baron, CEET director of marketing and communications, at mbaron@niu.edu.
