Team Adviser Responsibilities

The following are the minimal responsibilities of the adviser for a senior design team. Please do not agree to be the adviser for a senior design team unless you feel that you can fulfill these duties.

• Meet with the team once a week to review progress. The team should meet at some point prior to their scheduled meeting with you in order for them to organize what they want to discuss with you. During the meeting with the adviser, the team should review what they accomplished in the previous week, and the goals for the next week. It is important that the adviser hold the team to their goals, and try to discover the root causes when goals are not met. It is not acceptable for an adviser and team to only meet when there are 'problems' to discuss, as this just gives encouragement for teams to not meet with their adviser. Hopefully, most meetings will be relatively short as teams report progress.
• Attend the mid-semester and end-of-semester presentations so that you can evaluate the team's work.
• At the end of the semester, provide a grade of between 0 and 10 for each team member in terms of their performance for this week.

Technical Assistance

The team adviser does not have to be the sole technical adviser for the team. The team may be working with technologies that are unfamiliar to the adviser, in which case the team is urged to seek technical advice from whatever source is appropriate. If the adviser gives technical advice on a topic, then that advice should take precedence over whatever other technical advice the team receives from other sources.

Document Review

Senior design teams in each semester have several documents to prepare. It is not the responsibility of the adviser to review these documents. However, it would be useful if the adviser would review the mid-semester and end-of-semester presentations, and give feedback on these before the presentation dates. The bottom line on these presentations is that they should address the questions found on the mid-semester and end-of-semester review forms. See the templates section for these forms.