Priorities:Florida Institute of Technology Student Priorities

Overview

Florida Tech has also recently been names as one of the Top 50 Entrepreneurial Universities by Forbes, which is a testament to the purpose efforts undertaken in recent years to create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. As a private institution, Florida Tech has a history of high-quality undergraduate engineering education. However, Florida Tech has yet to realize its entrepreneurial potential due to a lack of formal training and education in entrepreneurship of faculty, the administration, and students. Largely, only a few faculty initially spearheaded the entrepreneurial endeavors, but as with many culture-changing endeavors, the current champions seek to create a critical mass of followers, adopters, and co-implementers.

Strategy # 1: Increase interdisciplinary collabration for student capstone projects

Tactic # 1: Create a pilot capstone design program incorporating college of engineering and college of business students

Currently, students spend an entire year at FIT developing an almost industry-ready designs. Many times, these designs go on display at the university, but unfortunately, do not go much further than this. We are trying to incorporate business students into these projects to create successful businesses out of these projects that students work long hours developing.

Tactic # 2: Amalgamize all individual departmental capstone courses into one overarching, univesity-wide capstone course

Senior Design is currently run by each individual major. Multidisciplinary projects exist far and few between, which is a disservice to the students as well as the university. We wish to eradicate the current major-specific senior design program and make cross-major projects more commonplace, if not required. This gives a more in-depth experience of a real industry project.

Tactic # 3: Get industry members to advise and sponsor the univeristy-wide capstone projects

We wish to see more industry-sponsored projects as capstone projects as well. We have had many successful projects sponsored by companies like Northrop Grumman, Harris Corporation, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and more. This interaction not only helps students feel the real experience of being an engineer in these companies, but they often are offered jobs as a result. Additionally, with the funding provided by the sponsor, these projects are of minimal cost to the university, enabling other unsponsored projects to receive more funding.