Engineering Practices Introductory Course Sequence. Every student from the Colorado School of Mines has taken the two-course series, and talks about it with a slight distaste in his mouth. For some students it’s a much-needed first pass at writing reports, dressing up, speaking in front of others. (This is something I’ve actually come to appreciate about the system - its emphasis on presenting to peers.)

I remember when I took it, we were supposed to design a small device within certain (relatively arbitrary) constraints to collect a soil sample. The premise was unrelatable - that we might one day be responsible for a subsystem deployed to collect a soil sample on a distant planet, without thought about its return.

It’s become rather popular lately in certain communities to program and attach digital cameras to weather balloons and take pictures from as high up as 30km (about 20 miles) or so. The results speak for themselves:

What I found regrettable about my EPICS experience was that it was too far removed to really care about the project. It had its fun moments, and I was glad that for EPICS 2 I got to work on a project I really believed in with some friends (it was a considerable improvement). But this is an example of a project I contemplate and eye over longingly, even outside the context of a course. Similar projects can cost on the order of a couple hundred dollars and are relatively feasible, even for freshman engineers. To have something you built venture farther from the earth than any one of us likely ever will, bring back pictures and live to tell the tale would be extremely rewarding.

Had there been projects like this when I was in school, I know that my experience would have been that much more enriched.