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The capstone of the engineering major is the engineering clinic project which has students working on “real engineering problems as encountered in business”. Companies pay the college to have teams of senior engineering majors solve a problem they face. Two of the sexier projects were Disneyland hired HMC to come up with an anti-collision system for autopia and West Dorm had a clinic team refurbish a beloved vintage pinball machine.



My university had a student club doing that and it's probably my fondest memory of engineering. It was so inspiring and almost addicting to work on projects that actual people would use or have their lives improved by. And you got to have a hand in writing firmware, machining parts/enclosures, meeting the customer (mostly doctors, which was super cool), and researching the market fit for if it were a real project. It was so much fun.

I really wish my post-college engineering experience could be anything like that. I miss making useful things.


My wife, after she finished her MS in Software Engineering, ended up in a job where one of her first tasks was writing DOS .BAT files.

On the other hand, her first asp.net page was demonstrated by Steve Ballmer at CES, so she did advance in the world.




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