Associating Practising Engineers in Final Year Projects - A Case Study

Final year Mechanical Engineering undergraduate students at Universiti Teknologi Petronas (UTP) are required to complete a Final Year Project (FYP), as part of the graduating requirement. In this course, students are given opportunity to use their knowledge as well as problem-solving tools and methods that they have acquired throughout their study to independently carry out research or design work. The project supervision and evaluations are mainly done by lecturers although practising engineers from the industries are invited to participate. These engineers are identified based on their long experience in the students’ project areas. Their presence in the campus twice throughout the project period have been expected to be fruitful in helping develop student projects in parallel with industrial requirement and practice. Hence the involvement of practising engineers from the industry as external examiners proved to be beneficial to the final year projects. This paper discusses the selection mechanism of the practising engineers as external examiners for students’ FYP, their role, the UTP experience with external examiners, their effectiveness for the FYP and their contributions.