At the heart of IRE are industry-driven engineering projects; this semester, our group's industry partner was DesignWise Medical, a non-profit pediatric medical devices company. Compared to working on an internal IRE project, this experience has been much different on many levels. First, I felt a greater obligation to work on the project, because the project is real. In this case, delivering a sub par product would have meant letting down a non-profit company with the goal of improving the quality of life for children. Second, it became obvious whenever we fell behind on our work. Since the client was 200 miles away from us, our group met with the client weekly via teleconference. Long silences during these meetings were a sign that we had not made significant progress that week, and that we would need to change our work habits for the following week. And third, getting client feedback throughout the entire design process gave us a clear sense of what the client expected and forced us to reconsider our decisions. For example, we had initially dismissed one of our options, but then the client requested that we further pursue the option. This option later became part of our final recommendation. All in all, it has been a great experience and I look forward to future projects of this type!
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