They may have the engineering correct, but how are they at presenting before a group of business people?

They are engineering students at UC Merced, and this is the twice-annual Innovate to Grow project presentation held at the end of the spring and fall semesters.

For the past four months, teams of students have been working with their business and non-profit clients.

The clients come to the table with real business process problems. The students use engineering principles studied in the classroom to research and apply solutions.

Week after week, they have updated their instructors on their progress, learned new approaches to solving problems, and stayed in contact with their clients.

By the semester’s end, they must present their solutions to a group of community representatives.

I have attended this event over the past few years as an observer. But this time around, I signed up to be a judge.

I took time off from work and headed to the campus to help evaluate the projects.

The day started with a showcase of all projects in the college gymnasium. Set up like a trade show, the event was designed to give students a chance to answer questions in an impromptu environment.

The event also gave outsiders like me a chance to see other projects in addition to the three I would be judging. Following lunch and networking with other judges, we were led to classrooms.

The presentations were held in two buildings on the new section of the campus: the south side.

These buildings opened to students in just the past year. It feels funny to describe that side of the campus as new. UC Merced has only been around a little over ten years.

Inside the classrooms, student teams made half-hour presentations of their projects.

Each team of judges was assigned to evaluate three student presentations. As judges we would listen to the presentation, ask questions of the students, then fill out our digital evaluation forms.

The engineering professor who coordinated the presentations used the judges’ evaluations as a component of each student’s final grade. “Look at these presentations just as if the students were a real engineering firm making an engineering solution pitch,” Professor Alejandro Gutierez told us prior to the judging.

Presentations were divided into three categories: Innovation and Design, Engineering Service Learning, and the Mobile App Challenge.

The three student teams within the Innovation and Design classification that our group judged took this final assignment seriously.

They were dressed in business clothes and were well rehearsed for the formal portion of the presentation.

I was impressed with each team’s handling of questions from the judges. They answered the questions, helped one another by providing additional information, and clearly demonstrated they were invested in their projects.

One project we evaluated was a solution to capturing bit pieces of plastic that fall to the floor from a recycling facility. The students analyzed the project from a cost, efficiency, maintenance, and complexity perspective.

They discussed their prototype, shared their implementation issues, and touched on barriers to moving forward.

Mark Matsumoto, the Dean of the School of Engineering, told me many of these students are first generation students. “This is their first exposure to the realities of engineering as a career.”

Innovate to Grow, or I2G as it is referred to on campus, started in 2012.

It engages the local community by identifying real engineering problems that students work on to solve. Having the public involved as judges of their projects helps take these students out of their relative safe comfort zones on campus to a more “real world” atmosphere where they have to sell their ideas.

They also have to sell themselves as authorities on their projects.

As one of the students summed up her experience with the Innovate to Grow initiative, “It’s great!.”