About EPICS
EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) was founded at Purdue University in 1995. The creators of this program saw a way to combine student work with the needs of local community service organizations that could benefit all involved. Student teams are comprised of multiyear, multidisciplinary students that solve engineering and technology-based problems for these partnering organizations to create solutions that can be used by the organization.
EPICS' Goals
- Broaden students' education to include experience with design as a start-to-finish process by defining, designing, building, testing, deploying, and supporting real systems
- Bring affordable engineering expertise to community service and education organizations
Benefits for Students
- Real World Skills for Engineering Students
- Communication Skills
- Teamwork
- Start-to-Finish Design Experience
- Project Management, Organizational, and Leadership Skills
- Resource Management
- Professional Ethics
- Customer Awareness
- Interdisciplinary Experience
- Resourcefulness
- Community Awareness
- Maturity
- Pride
Benefits to Community Project Partners
- Engineering Change in Our Community
- Access to technical knowledge and resources that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive
- Opportunities to improve current services
- Opportunities for new services
- Opportunities to try new, innovative ideas
- Positioning as a leader among area not-for-profits
Member Institutions
Since its founding, EPICS has grown to become a national consortium of the following fifteen universities:
- Purdue University
- Butler University
- University of California, Merced
- University of California, San Diego
- Case Western Reserve University
- Columbia University
- Georgia Institute of Technology
- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Iowa State University
- University of Notre Dame
- Penn State University
- University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus
- San Jose State University
- University of Wisconsin, Madison
- Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Many of our EPICS projects at WPI are associated with these existing courses: s1020" title="ES 1020">ES 1020 Introduction to Engineering Problems, e2300" title="ME 2300">ME 2300 Introduction to Engineering Design and e3506">ME 3506 Rehabilitation Engineering. In addition, there are opportunities to pursue major group projects relating technology and society (Interactive Qualifying Project) and senior design projects (Major Qualifying Project).
Maintained by webmaster@wpi.eduLast modified: November 15, 2007 10:03:53