Signal Processing - November 2016 - 123

SP education
Ed Richter and Arye Nehorai

Enriching the Undergraduate Program with Research Projects

their involvement in undergraduate
research projects.
Over the years, we have streamlined
our approach and developed the program
described here that works well for stu-
dents interested in gaining independent
project experience at the undergraduate
level. This approach includes both under-
graduate participation in faculty research
as well as projects with Ph.D. students
and our Professor of Practice, Ed Richter,
as mentors. Overall, we have had more
than 200 students from the ESE Depart-
ment and from other departments partici-
pate in our undergraduate research
projects program.

EDITORS' NOTE
The article in this "SP Education" column is the second in a special series on
hands-on and design projects for signal processing education. The authors
from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, share their
experiences and best practices of introducing undergraduate research projects
as a key element in the undergraduate education of their electrical and system
engineering program. Many of the projects are related to signal processing.
As we will see, the program has energized the students' understanding and
interests toward signal processing and, more generally, electrical engineering,
and contributed to an impressive record of attracting students to pursue the
field. We hope you will find the article inspiring, and stay tuned for more articles in the series in upcoming issues.
-Hana Godrich, lead guest editor
and Kenneth Lam, area editor, columns and forums

hile some engineering departments
struggle with low enrollment today,
the Preston M. Green Electrical and
Systems Engineering (ESE) Department
at Washington University in St. Louis,
Missouri, more than tripled over the last
ten years. This was done under the guid-
ance of Dr. Arye Nehorai, who was
appointed its chair in 2006. This growth,
including 34% female enrollment, is
mostly due to students joining our
department during or after their freshman
year. The growth was fueled by improve-
ments to the undergraduate educational
experience including creating an under-
graduate research program, improving
the instruction quality, revising old cours-
es, creating new courses, modernizing

our laboratories, creating study abroad
programs, and communicating the new
opportunities in the ESE Department to
the engineering student body. This arti-
cle focuses on the undergraduate re -
search program.

Introduction

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2016.2601652
Date of publication: 4 November 2016

The undergraduate research program was
created in response to student interest and
current trends in education and gave us an
opportunity to add more exciting design
elements to our curriculum. Our students
gain valuable experience in research,
design, algorithm development, project
implementation, and verification. These
are skills that students can share during
job interviews for both academia and
industry. Also, some of our undergraduate
researchers have decided to pursue
careers in academia as a direct result of

IEEE Signal Processing Magazine

November 2016

ESE297: Introduction to
Undergraduate Research Projects
Freshmen and sophomores who are inter-
ested in undergraduate research projects
are encouraged to take our Introduction
to Undergraduate Research Projects
(ESE297) course [1]. This three-credit
course provides exposure to signal pro-
cessing topics and introduces the design
process early in the curriculum. By intro-
ducing design earlier, the students are not
only preparing for undergraduate research
projects but also for our Capstone Design
course. The students learn valuable team-
work skills by working in groups of two.
They are guided through the design pro-
cess for two signal processing projects.
These projects were selected after a few
early undergraduate researchers and their
mentors worked on these projects for a
few semesters.
123

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Signal Processing - November 2016