Alumni & Friends
Opportunities to Support the Department of Mechanical Engineering
We are so very proud of our Alumni and understand that your pride in your University of Utah heritage is dependent on continued Mechanical Engineering Department excellence. You can help continue the legacy of excellence by taking an active, supportive role in our program.
Please take a few moments today to visit the University of Utah Online Donation page and make a contribution. Be sure to specify that your donation is to Mechanical Engineering in the text box on the above website, and that you earmark your donation for use in the Nuts and Bolts Campaign (or any other Mechanical Engineering program you wish to support). By doing so, you can be assured that your donation will fully utilized for the benefit you desire.
General Support
Our department has been fortunate to receive increasing support from the State of Utah for new faculty positions, new lab and machining equipment, and renovation of student project studio space. Further, our increasing enrollment has resulted in increased funding for our teaching assistants. We thank the Utah legislators and governor for their vision of an improving Utah economy driven by well-educated engineering graduates.
That increased support is narrowly focused however, and our needs are diverse. Examples of unfunded needs include: scholarship support to help our hardworking undergraduate students succeed, travel support to bring top graduate student recruits to our campus, tutoring for good students struggling to gain command of the engineering sciences. Such funds allow us to seed initiatives that we believe will pay great departmental dividends in the future and are central to the operation of all elite engineering departments.
We’re pleased that our alumni and friends understand the relationship between greatness and giving. Indeed, departmental rankings are based in part on the metric of percentage of alumni who donate back to the department. By helping us through your generous contributions, the status of your department, and the value of your ME degree, increases. Please consider the value of your engineering education in your life and the hard work of the ME staff and faculty in facilitating that education. Then make a donation that reflects your sincere gratitude.
Nuts and Bolts Campaign
The Department of Mechanical Engineering is committed to giving students the opportunity to design and build real-world devices, systems or machines. In order to provide this experience, the “Nuts and Bolts Campaign” was created to support undergraduates in the study of engineering design by providing direct funding to students to build prototypes of their designs.
Through past support of alumni and friends, we have been able to provide funding and needed resources for many of our ME student design projects. The Department of Mechanical Engineering is very grateful to those who have supported us in the past and thank each donor for their generosity.
The “Nuts and Bolts Campaign” is continuing this year, and we are again asking the help of the ME department’s alumni and friends. Parts, tools and materials are needed to turn good design ideas into great finished projects. With the help of you and your fellow ME’s, we hope to raise $10,000 to support student design projects during the upcoming 2007-08 academic year.
Integrated design experiences are an essential part of our undergraduate curriculum. Students are required to take a Design and Visualization course during their first year. The concepts they learn as first-year students are reinforced throughout the next three years, culminating in the yearlong senior design course. As seniors, our students work together in teams to conceptualize solutions to a real life problem, formulate designs, construct prototypes, and finally test their creations. Their communication training provided though the CLEAR program perfectly augments this team effort as students are required to document each step, and provide oral progress and final report presentations on their projects. Experiences like these are what create exceptional engineers, and our commitment to an extraordinary senior design class series is core to our goal of educating the next generation of engineering leaders.
Some fundraising is felt to be a part of the overall design experience. Thus, students are encouraged to raise as much external money as they can before requesting assistance from the “Nuts and Bolts” fund. By leveraging funds in this way, we were able to support the design projects of over 70 individual students this year. Without external and Nuts and Bolts funding, our students would be forced to limit the scope of their design ideas based solely on affordability of construction materials. If that happens, we would not be competitive against other institutions in nation-wide student design contests. This year for example, funds from the “Nuts and Bolts Campaign” enabled the Moonbuggy Design Team to compete against more than 20 universities at the 14th Annual Great Moonbuggy Race on April 13-14, 2007 in Huntsville, Alabama, at which they earned the Rookie Award for posting the fastest first-year time in the competition and a special safety systems award.