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1.INTRODUCTIONThe Clinic program, an extraordinary program of collaboration between industry and Harvey Mudd College that has been a hallmark of this institution for more than 50 years, engages juniors and seniors in the solution of real-world, technical problems for industrial clients. [1] The term “Clinic” borrows from medical practice when new doctors are taught to practice their skills with real patients in hospitals in their last stage of academic training. They work directly on the real medical problems and cases, and learn from the more experienced doctors and gain practice skills. The vision of the Clinic program is that engineers in training ought to work on real-world engineering problems like doctors before graduation. By working directly on an open-ended problem (without a unique solution), and working closely with the industry liaisons, students gain tremendous practice and professional training through these projects. Since the real world is full of problems waiting for engineering solutions, the effort goes into the Clinic program is not only for the education of the students, which is the core value of the Clinic for the college and for the students, but also for its delivered solution and outcome to impact the real industry as a byproduct. Currently in HMC, Clinic program runs across multiple departments, including Engineering, Computer Science, Physics and Mathematics department. There are also a small number of Global Clinic projects when an oversea industry sponsor and often an oversea partner university are jointly involved in such a project. All Clinic projects are recruited from the industry sponsor, and each project allows for a team of 4 to 6 students to solve a real-world problem over one academic year. Since Clinic is a required course in Engineering department, one year for the senior students and one semester for the junior students, the size of the program or the number of engineering Clinic projects fluctuates slightly from year to year based on the number of major students. An engineering Clinic team is mixed of seniors and juniors and juniors switch to new team members between the semesters to simulate the transition of team personal as that happens in the industry setting. One (sometimes two) faculty advisor is assigned to each project. A lot of effort goes behind the scene to establish the portfolio of projects with a wide variety of choices of disciplines, which might be one of the operating challenges of the program. Sponsors commit a fixed fee and internally we have certain structures to support the financial needs of the overall program. But in this report, we primarily focus our discussion on the educational benefit of the program and how it impacts the student learning. It is quite often to have a joint project across two departments (Engineering, Computer Science, Physics and Mathematics) due to the multidisciplinary nature of many projects. Because Clinic is established as a college program, there are many benefits of one supporting structure across different departments to run the program operation throughout the year. This involves complicated contracting stage and financial management with a variety of sponsor entities (companies, educational institutions, national labs and non-profit organizations). In addition, many common events on campus such as early meet between students and sponsors and final projects day that wraps up the projects should be carefully coordinated. In the first semester, the teams conduct design review sessions with several other teams in less formal presentations, where the students solicit input and feedback from their peers and faculty. In the second semester, more formal presentations are delivered so that students get to learn about other projects and share their own work in a professional fashion. Liaisons are also invited to the spring semester presentations. Additional site visits and face-to-face meeting are often arranged to facilitate the project progress. Students and the faculty advisor individually manage their own team progress by working closely with the technical liaisons from their sponsor. Regular weekly feedback is critically important to track the progress of the project. When facing real problems, important skills such as communication, team work and leadership can be flexibly and naturally incorporated as the project proceeds. A budget is requested at the beginning of the semester by each team and approved by the Clinic directors who oversee the recruitment of the projects as well as higher level Clinic program management. The overall program allows for a broader educational experience than more specific optical engineering specialties, however, the exposure to various technical aspects of the optical project brings great benefits, opportunities and challenges. These projects provide a great match with the broader educational goal of the general engineering program at HMC. While the Clinic program is not specifically designed for optical engineering education, a variety of optical projects have been completed throughout the years. In section 2, a good sample of these past optical projects will be discussed with more specific details. In section 3 and 4, the report will review and summarize some of the important undergraduate skills as learning outcome of the program, how learning optics happens in the Clinic program and some of the challenges that we observed. My personal experiences as a faculty advisor will also be shared throughout. We hope such experiences and lessons provide values for other institutions and educators who consider to incorporate hands-on experience and often multidisciplinary nature of the optical engineering in the undergraduate level. 2.SAMPLE OPTICAL PROJECTSIn this section, we provide three different optical project samples over a long span of time. While the specific technology involved in each project has evolved quite a bit in recent years, in the educational context, it is less relevant in terms of training undergraduates’ practical skills. A brief project statement and background will be provided and the final deliverables of the team will also be provided. We will review some of the main challenges that the students face in these projects. The outcome in each project provides a good sample and insight in terms of overall success of the projects and effectiveness of such hands-on educational efforts. We will review experiences that best assist students in researching the relevant background technology and efficiently applying their knowledge in such open-ended problems with limited time and financial resources. These sample projects provide a good variety of scopes and applications for the optical technologies in an institution with broad engineering educational emphasis. Specifically, the four projects are (1) Federal Aviation Administration, “Update and Integration of LED Airport Approach Lighting” in 2002-2003, (2) Ultra Violet Product Inc. “Uniform Illumination for Fluorescent In Vivo Imaging” in 2005-2006, (3) City of Hope, “Redesigning the Lighting and Optics for Laparoscopic Surgery”, 2016-2017. From these experiences, we review a set of common potential areas for bringing in optical projects in the undergraduate level, specifically for a program such as HMC Clinic that is not targeted at optical engineering education. 2.1Project 1: Update and Integration of LED Airport Approach Lighting-FAAAirport runways use incandescent approaching light systems. This FAA project is an early exploration of replacing the current lighting systems with LED and maintaining comparable luminescence. The team built prototypes for two different light approaching systems (MALSR and ALSF-2 system respectively). The main body of work includes LED selections, electrical power management, luminance measurement, LED configuration and light bar mechanical design, and field testing. Some specific challenges are highlighted below:
Some limitations and further development of the project:
2.2Project 2: Uniform Illumination for Fluorescent In Vivo Imaging – UVPOptical fluorescence in vivo imaging is an important tool to evaluate biological changes in living specimens for tutor biology and drug discovery. UVP is a company focusing on UV sources for optical fluorescence bio-imaging systems. One of the challenges is to have uniform illumination in an enclosure of a small cabinet size, and it is specified as 25cmx25cmx35cm for a typical size of the UV imaging system that UVP carries in their product line. The uniformity is a critical condition in such instruments because otherwise the brightness of biomarker fluorescence will be skewed to reflect the true quantitative measurements. Any variation in light intensity incident on the sample creates artifacts in optical fluorescence imaging data. The team was a joint team with engineering students from HMC and management and marketing students from Keck Graduate Institute (KGI). The market analysis was important to the UVP for its product developments in that time frame. As a result, the engineering team of 3 students was also less than a typical Clinic team size involved in design and prototyping. The team completed four design alternatives and built three different prototypes. The uniformity of illumination, which was the most important performance, was evaluated experimentally as well as in TracePro, a ray-tracing simulation software. There are a few main challenges students encountered:
2.3Project 3: Redesigning the Lighting and Optics for Laparoscopic Surgery – City of HopeThis is an on-going Clinic project this year on redesigning the lighting and optics for laparoscopic surgery. Laparoscopic surgeries are commonly done to reduce the trauma of large open abdominal (or chest) surgery, and offers faster recovery for patients. The existing set of tools includes the central visualization and imaging tool that contains a light source and camera system. This system is extremely expensive and tethered with high power electrical sources that is stationed next to the operation table, and has been around for more than 20 years. The motivation of the project is to explore low cost and low power technology alternatives. For example, LEDs are much lower cost but provides high luminance with more development of efficiency, and small cost effective camera systems are readily accessible with the rapid development of the smart phone technology. This is an exciting project to potentially disrupt the technology in surgeries, and provide more opportunities for medical conditions in underdeveloped regions. The team would examine the feasibility of the designs, how the performance of lighting and image quality in comparison to the existing system, and how other features could be incorporated as a result of such a big shift in devices. Because this is an on-going project, I will provide the description in terms of context of the problem and specific challenges. The explored solution and directions are summarized without getting to the specific final details of the design. There are some interesting challenges in this particular project:
Table 1:Summary of technology and disciplines involved in the three sample Clinic projects
3.UNDERGRADUATE LEARNING SKILLSThese optics projects in Clinic work well for the undergraduate learning skills. The main lesson might be learned is the careful scoping of each of the projects. The well-structured program is highly valuable for supporting the undergraduate projects. It facilitates the schedule management of the whole project, and the expertise of the faculty is mainly from schedule and team management perspective than from technical guidance focus. The support of the liaisons from the industrial sponsor not only provides more direct technical guidance and expectation, but the relationship is a good balance of pressure and mentorship. The faculty usually provides a lot of soft support regarding schedule management and the next immediate task feedback, and it also provides a lot of support for feedback in presentation and written documents. The technical support is intentionally limited to be small so that within the Engineering department, it provides a lot more flexibility of matching projects and faculty specialties, but more importantly creates the culture of student ownership in the final technical solution and ideas. This provides a healthy environment of creativity and freedom given the guidance of time structure and specific deliverable and expectation from the combined academic needs and sponsor needs. The project level (even for optical projects) should include a broad set of principles so that different students can contribute to different aspects of the project, which you can pull out students’ skills more easily in the undergraduate level. Students in HMC are not specifically trained for optical engineering area, so a project too specialized and narrowed in that area would require all the students to pick up learning in the discipline, and put more pressure on the learning curve as well as challenge of team contribution to the same area. A broader based project that centralized on optical devices can provide a good balance between what students’ background and what they need to learn on the fly during the project. For example, all of these sample projects involve prototype designs (creativity), mechanical construction, electrical circuitry set up, and maybe modeling and simulation tools for performance evaluation. If other institutions that have an engineering curriculum focusing more heavily on optics training, then they might strike proper balance differently (optics vs. non-optics discipline). For HMC Clinic students, half and half breakdown seems a good starting point. The hands-on project is a good model to incorporate undergraduate skills such as writing, communication and leadership. These come naturally as the element of project needs. The overall structure support and framework is helpful to provide enough of freedom and wiggle room for mistakes, but avoid complete chaos or disaster in project management. This might be necessary for undergraduates as they lack previous project management skills. Even though there are plenty of team work opportunities in other course works, a yearlong project management and experience can be quite different and daunting. Faculty guidance and previous junior Clinic experience and exposure provides good transition from dependent to independent engineers. 4.CONCLUSIONIn a brief summary, we believe HMC Engineering with strength in the system and design area allows the students to incorporate multiple aspects of a typical optical project such as mechanical design, electrical circuitry design, prototyping design and testing, quantitative analysis and simulation evaluation. A broad range of projects would be good fit for the undergraduate students with sufficient background in electrical, mechanical and design. The core optics part of the project should be kept at a reasonable level for students to pick up from their research easily even if their background is not particularly strong. More specialized program with stronger curriculum support in the optical engineering could potentially consider projects that require deeper analytical and theoretical background in optics. Local sponsors/industrial partners always provide more convenience for technical support and feedback, which is critical to maintaining the strong communication between the students and the sponsor throughout the span of the project. The optical project experience in HMC Clinic indicates the great potential to bringing optical hands-on project in the undergraduate level. A team structure provides flexibility in adjusting the scope of the project and bringing in broader multidisciplinary aspects that’s beyond the core optics. The financial model of the Clinic program support might not be easily transferrable to other institutions because of the long-established history, however the scope and how much a team of undergraduates can accomplish in these projects can be used as a good reference model for other programs as they seek and connect with local industry sponsors to their optical educational program. Somewhat surprisingly, industries beyond optical industry are better places to look for opportunities because these traditional industries just start to change and update their infrastructure and ways of operation by incorporating many recent developments from the optical engineering industry. REFERENCESJ. Yasny and R. Soffer,
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