Connecting with Undergraduates can be a great way to attract future engineers to your organization. There are two ways to connect with undergraduate industrial and systems engineers:
Building a Pipeline to Hire Undergraduate Talent
- 1. Hire summer interns, co-op and full-time students
- 2. Participate in UF ISE Career Fair
- 3. Sponsor an information session night
The best way to introduce students to your company is by hiring them during a semester and summer. Good experiences travel far via word of mouth and lead to full-time hires.
UF ISE Career Fair is an excellent opportunity to meet a lot of ISE students in our B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. programs. The company may participate and have access to the resume database, have a table during the event, and have the company logo printed on some promotional material for a fee of $500.
Information sessions can be arranged through the UF ISE or UF Career Resource Center. Students are easily lured with refreshments.
Improving the Educational Experience for Undergraduate Students
- 1. Be a Connect-the-Dots Speaker
- 2. Be a Sales Engineering Seminar speaker
- 3. Provide real data for projects for relevant classes
- 4. Sponsor a class case study competition
- 5. Sponsor and deliver a workshop
Students always want to see the relevancy of the material taught in class. There are often a number of opportunities over the course of a semester to bring practitioners into the classroom. You can choose a subset of the courses in our curriculum (e.g., Inventory & Supply Chain Systems, Lean Production Systems and Decision-Support Systems), and be a guest speaker during classroom meetings to demonstrate the relevance of the course material to the operations of the company.
This unique program to UF exposes students to careers in sales. Sponsors may speak in the designated seminar (and provide recruiting pitch) as well as have recruiting access to the students who are working towards obtaining a minor in Sales Engineering.
A subset of our courses (e.g., Facilities Planning and Work Design and Industrial Systems Simulation) require a term project. Real projects with real data are always more interesting and satisfying to the students. The instructor for the course would work with you in framing the project.
A competition can often be substituted for a term project. The company can provide a data analytics, quality control, lean manufacturing or supply chain case study for the student teams in the respective class. The top three teams can be awarded cash prizes (but grading would be completed separately by the professor to assess the fulfillment of the student learning outcomes).
Workshops that support the UF ISE curriculum can be arranged. Recently, a large manufacturing company delivered a Lean Manufacturing workshop and a mini-case study competition for student teams who wanted to learn more about the tools for implementing Lean Manufacturing in practice.