Electrical Engineering


Faculty Honors Advisors

James Aberle
Mike Ranjram
Nicholas Rolston

About this opportunity

ECEE has attracted national and international attention due to our continued strength in providing innovative academic programs, outstanding research performance, and growth in student enrollment to record levels. ECEE offers honors students enrolled in the Electrical Engineering (EE) Undergraduate Program several opportunities to help them to fulfill requirements for graduation from Barrett, the Honors College (BHC). Broadly speaking there are three opportunities: turning EE program courses into honors courses through Honors Enrichment Contracts, courses receiving automatic honors credit, and performing research for the BHC Thesis/Creative Project. In addition, EE students can use their senior design capstone project to fulfill BHC requirements.

Thesis

Students graduating from BHC must complete an honors thesis/creative project, which is a document that describes the body of research undertaken by the student. In most cases, EE students take EEE 488/489 as their capstone design sequence and may use their senior capstone design project to fulfill BHC requirements for the honors thesis/creative project. Alternatively, the student may use EEE 493 (Honors Thesis) or HON 493 (Honors Thesis) to fulfill this requirement.

Prior to commencing work on their honors thesis, students planning to graduate from BHC must complete a thesis/creative project information session. The session is designed to make certain they have been informed about the process, expectations, and deadlines. Students may complete this requirement through an on-line workshop offered through Barrett via ASU Blackboard.
The BHC needs documentation to serve as the written portion of the thesis/creative project. This written report, and its contents, will always be determined by the thesis director. The written report might narrate in detail what the student has done, the project's importance to the engineering field and what its importance could be, any problems the student encountered and how they were solved, and how the student might expand the project if given more time and opportunity. The honors thesis should represent a body of work performed independently by the student under the guidance of a faculty mentor. The honors research MUST be work performed above and beyond the normal coursework required for the BSE degree, and it MUST be work completed individually by the student. 

The BHC also requires that the thesis/creative project include a traditional oral defense attended by a thesis committee. The minimum number of committee members is two, a Director and a second committee member. Only the director MUST be an ASU faculty member (lecturer or tenure-line).

Academic Preparation

There are some opportunities for BHC students to receive funding for their projects and perhaps even a stipend for themselves. For example, the Fulton Undergraduate Research Initiative (FURI) provides a stipend and a small amount of funding for undergraduate research. Honors students may use their FURI-funded project as their honors research. For more information on the FURI program, please visit the FURI website. Another opportunity is the ASU/NASA Space Grant which supports graduate and undergraduate students in a variety of disciplines to further their educational experiences in science, engineering research, and informal education programs. Individual faculty members may also choose to fund undergraduate researchers working under their mentorship from sponsored research grants or contracts.

Recommended Timeline

Students are encouraged to seek out a faculty mentor early so that the honors research can be clearly defined well in advance of the senior year.

Registration Procedures:

Honors thesis using EEE 488/489 Capstone:

Honors thesis using a project separate from the 488/489 Capstone:

  • Complete thesis/creative project information session: https://barretthonors.asu.edu/academics/thesis-and-creative-project/gett...
  • Work with faculty advisor supervising the project and sign up for EEE 492 during the 2nd to last semester and EEE 493 during the last semester to receive honors credit. If the student is working with an EE faculty member.
  • Register for EEE 492/493 by turning the form into the EE Advising Center: insert link to form
  • If the student is working with a faculty member from another discipline, the student needs to sign up for the 492/493 classes with the prefix of the faculty member’s discipline. For example, a student working with a mechanical engineering professor, the student registers for MAE 492/MAE 493.
  • Student can receive technical elective credit for only XXX 493 (3 credit hours) upon program chair approval. Tech elective credit will be determined when you submit your EEE 493 form for registration.

Other Honors Opportunities

Any EEE course may be turned into an honors course through an Honors Enrichment Contract. Students wishing to receive honors credit for the course should confer with the course instructor at the beginning of the semester in order to develop a mutually acceptable plan for the honors enrichment activity. Most honors contracts involve either a project that extends the ideas and techniques covered in the course or outside research on topics relevant to the course work. Students have the responsibility to apply for the honors contract through BHC. The honors college contacts the instructor to approve the contract only after the student has initiated the process.
At the present time, one course in the EE undergraduate program (EEE 230) is considered to be an automatic honors course for honors students. Honors students enrolled in this course will automatically receive honors credit without needing to complete an honors contract. Honors students can also earn automatic honors credit without the need for an honors contract by completing a graduate level course.

College

Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering

Campus

Tempe