IMPRINT

Morrill Engineering Program

IMPRINT pairs promising high school seniors with a faculty member on campus or with an employer. The experience is intended to introduce students to engineering and motivate them to remain in the College of Engineering.

Eligible students are identified during the senior year in high school and are encouraged to apply to the University of Illinois based upon their standardized test scores. Those students admitted to the university who have an interest in engineering or computer science are invited to provide additional information on an IMPRINT application, which is shared with employers participating in the program. For further information, click here.

Corporate Component of IMPRINT
The completed IMPRINT applications are sent to the employers, who interview and select participants. Depending upon the location of the employer, interviews are held via telephone or students may be invited for a site visit. In some cases, the employer arranges to come to Chicago (where many of the applicants reside) for a day of interviews. Selected students begin their employment during the summer prior to enrolling on campus, and each summer thereafter, as long as the student has an acceptable employment and academic evaluation. If a student.s major changes, he or she may be dropped from the program.

An alternate approach that some employers select is to have a student applicant spend his or her first summer on campus, taking a course and working in one of the laboratories. The employer provides a grant to the college to support the student for the summer and plans to employ the student in the following summers.

Some employers use an initial contact to recruit the student into the Cooperative Education program.

An ideal time for an employer to interview students is during March and April. Final selection should be completed before May 1, because the students must commit to the school in which they plan to enroll by that time.

Research Component of IMPRINT
Thanks to corporate contributions, the Morrill Engineering Program can host at least 10 undergraduate admits on campus during the summer. (Students arrive the Sunday before classes begin in June for a period of eight (8) weeks, leaving after finals in August.) The research component provides the following package:

Room and board - students stay in Hendrick House (University of Illinois certified housing);
Pass for Intramural Physical Education (IMPE) and other campus recreation facilities;
Tuition for one summer school class, including books, supplies, and tutoring;
Work with a professor and/or graduate students (minimum 20 hours per week);
Software skill-development seminars (word-processing, spreadsheet, presentation, graphing, web design).

Since corporate contributions provide the financial support, participating professors receive free help for the summer in exchange for providing hands-on laboratory experience for the students. Although IMPRINT students typically do not have previous research experience, these students are ranked in the top of their senior high school class and, if guided in the right direction, can accomplish a significant amount in the summer.

What kind of work could a potential IMPRINT student do in a summer?

Design a web page (describing the research staff, facilities, results of research, and papers published, etc.);
Help run experiments and collect data for a graduate student (involves learning data collection and data reduction software);
Help install new instrumentation and equipment or build test setups for experiments;
Help fix instrumentation and equipment.

The IMPRINT program is made possible by corporate friends including: Boeing, Caterpillar, International Truck & Engine, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Procter & Gamble, and SBC.

For further information, contact:

IMPRINT
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
206 Engineering Hall, MC-272
1308 W. Green St.
Urbana, IL 61801
217/244-3815
mep-coe@uiuc.edu