ABOUT
The Senior Project course offers a brilliant opportunity to senior level students to solve a specific, real-time problem of an organization annually since 2008. The structure of this course is twofold, encompassing both theoretical and practical contributions. The first part, known as the Senior Project lecture, is a two-semester course program that enhances and supports the skills of senior students to effectively plan, manage and control large-scale real-world projects. The other part of the Senior Project course is “The University-Industry Collaboration” event, which is organized by the logistics student club.
This project course supports students in three distinctive dimensions:
- Support for Learning and Implementation: Project management, problem definition, data collection and analysis, reporting, field experience
- Support for Self-Improvement: Presentation, time and crisis management, professional relationship management, organization planning, teamwork, communication building, and technology utilization
- Employment Support: Internships, part- time and full time job opportunities
CONTEXT OF THE SENIOR PROJECT COURSE
Senior Project course by Department of Logistics Management, which began in 2008 and takes place regularly every year, enables a platform where participants from different sectors can gather, and generate new ideas by different and unique themes each year. Within the overall framework of this senior project, all professors from the department act as coordinators of the projects and evaluate student performance regularly.
The basic structure of this Senior Project course is twofold, encompassing both theoretical and practical contributions. The first part, known as the Senior Project lecture, is a two-semester course program that provides the basic skills to senior students to effectively plan, manage and control large-scale industrial projects. All projects have a sponsor and are guided by a professional/ team of professionals from the sponsor company and an academic advisor from the Department of Logistics Management. With a 3-5 person team, project scope is determined such that approximately 650 person-hours is spent for the entire project. An ideal project should cover combinations of the several knowledge areas that Logistics Management students can work on. Some of the areas can be listed as procurement, transportation planning, business process management, reverse logistics, capacity planning, facilities planning and/or design, logistics information systems, lean methods, material handling, performance management and/or measurement, supply and demand management. Over the nine months, student teams implement their logistics and project management knowledge to develop a proposal and to produce a solution for a real-world problem. The purpose of the program is to have senior students gain real-life experience in logistics and supply chain management.
The other part of the Senior Project course is the organization of “The University-Industry Collaboration” event. This event can be accepted as an output of the Senior Project course. At the end of the academic year, this event is performed within an interactive environment where the students have the opportunity to present their projects to the audience including the students, professionals and academicians, and create networks with the professionals. In addition, parallel to unique themes selected for the University-Industry Collaboration Event each year, keynote speakers are invited to give a seminar on specified topics. This event also encourages brainstorming for future research problems and provides a different perspective on the role and importance of logistics management in the professional field. Throughout conducting this event, the student club of the department, the Logistics Club, collaboratively works as a volunteer group to plan and implement the event, which fosters teamwork, project and crisis management skills of all levels of undergraduate students.