RESEARCH WORK AS A FINAL PROJECT IN ENGINEERING DEGREES

For many years in the engineering schools the final project has been considered to be a “professional work”. It should be dedicated to the preparation of a classical engineering design work of a technical office. The companies in our country did not innovate and there seemed to be no need for professionals with research capacities.
Nowadays more and more engineers have to do research tasks at their jobs. Some of them start their career as researchers at universities or at research centers, but more and more often some engineers develop their work at technological centers, or being responsible of research and innovation tasks at their companies, because they have to do in order to become more competitive.
In the degree there is no subject training the student in the abilities necessary for this kind of works, such as experiment design, techniques related to their specialty, etc. In the best case, some experimental techniques may have been presented in some subjects, but it is not common, at least in Spain, that the degree students have access to do real work with them.
This is the main reason why some research groups, from the schools of engineering have started offering the students the possibility of participating in research projects for developing their final project.
The students usually learn fast and they get high satisfaction with the research works assigned by their tutors, and in most cases the qualifications obtained through these works are quite high.
The tutor of these works has to be very involved in the research project and be able to dedicate hours of work for the training, the discussion of the results, and for solving the possible problems that the students may find during their work. The work of the tutor, together with the work of the student is essential for getting an excellent result.
In this work, we present results from two different universities in Spain, and different engineering degrees.