Effectively Engaging Industry Partners Within the Classroom

Student projects with an industry partner provide a meaningful way for students to translate abstract knowledge into practice, and to develop the data management and communication skills desired in industry. This paper provides suggestions for engaging an industry partner in a classroom and improving the classroom project experience. Set up as a competition, a single industry partner works with a multitude of student teams on the same problem. The project design aims to develop students’ project framing, data management, and communication skills. The paper covers general considerations for field-based course projects, and provides suggestions on how to address these issues. In general, students have given exceptionally good feedback ratings for the project. Learnings from the student, faculty, and industry partner perspectives are discussed. Although based primarily on experiences in a simulation class, instructions and practitioners can apply many of these observations more widely in an operations research or analytics curriculum.