Nearly 120 students started the year with off-campus project work at one of WPI’s more than 50 global project centers. Whether overseas in countries like Switzerland or Japan or in closer-to-home locations like New Hampshire’s White Mountains or Boston, students say the impact of working on an Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP) or a Major Qualifying Project (MQP) is much more than academic.
Some say project work closer to the WPI campus brings its own special benefits. At the Boston Project Center, for example, students experience the kind of immersive work that brings so much professional and personal growth. Boston is a world-class city that is less than 50 miles from Worcester.
“One of the reasons that the Boston Project Center is attractive to students, who for various reasons don’t want to go far away, is that it offers the opportunity to spend time in a large, vibrant city and get off campus,” says Seth Tuler, associate professor in the Global School, who co-directs the project center with Paul Mathisen, director of sustainability at WPI and associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Any project, whether it requires a plane ride or not, introduces valuable, real-world problems to solve. Students at the Boston Project Center generally live on campus and navigate the commute to Boston with their teammates two to three days per week. The experience provides a bit of insight into what the working world is like and can help as students think about their future career choices.
Just as many project center directors and project advisors do, Mathisen and Tuler work closely to give students a memorable term. “I love the city of Boston, and it has so much to offer,” says Mathisen. “When the students in the project center appreciate that, it’s fun to see.” The Boston-based projects allow students to get out into the city and its surroundings to work on regional challenges that require consideration of engineering and the social-economic-political issues to inform how communities, organizations, and government can address pressing challenges, says Tuler.
Past projects have included analyzing Boston’s parking inventory, working on the city’s landscape architecture, promoting wellness and positive mental health among tenants in subsidized housing, and even assessing components of Boston’s famed Harborwalk—and they can be quite different from projects based in less urban areas.
Recently, a Lumina Foundation article highlighted WPI’s project-based approach and showcased a Boston project that assessed green spaces in an urban housing complex. The students spoke of the importance of a project with real-world impact and how the in-state location still required them to develop a perspective different from what they might have already had.
In A-Term 2025, the Global Projects Program is hosting projects in these locations:
IQP
Boston, Massachusetts, with advisors Courtney Kurlanska (Department of Integrative and Global Studies) and Caitlin Ferrarini (DIGS)
Panama City, Panama, with advisors Grant Burrier (DIGS) and Alejandro Manga (contingent)
Reykjavik, Iceland, with advisors Fran Leahy (adjunct) and Lorraine Higgins (DIGS)
White Mountains, New Hampshire, with advisors Corey Dehner (DIGS) and Marc Trudeau (adjunct)
Zurich, Switzerland, with advisors Guillermo Salazar (adjunct) and Mehul Bhatia (Mechanical and Materials Engineering)
MQP
MIT Lincoln Laboratory-Lexington, Massachusetts, with advisor George Heineman (Computer Science)
Osaka (Ritsu), Japan, with advisor Ralph Sutter (Interactive Media and Game Development)
Switzerland (Fribourg) with advisor Jianyu Liang (MME)
Switzerland Project Center with advisors Sarah Wodin-Schwartz (MME) and Zoe Reidinger (Biomedical Engineering)
People
