Building and Integrating an Undergraduate Clinical Immersion Experience to Expand Impact

Exposure to the clinical environment - where the eventual results of student's engineering efforts are utilized - is a powerful educational experience. It provides real-world context for learning efforts and a hands-on opportunity for developing students to learn how to communicate effectively with their key stakeholders. Over the past five years, the Biomedical Engineering program at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) has developed and implemented a summer program focusing on providing a small cohort (10) of rising junior students with immersive exposure to the clinical environment, intensive practice with clinical needs finding, and hands-on experience in the biomedical engineering innovation lifecycle. This unique approach to timing the clinical experience, paired with feedback and feedforward integration throughout the curriculum, maximized the impact in a setting with limited resources. This paper will share key steps to take to initiate similar programs, highlight methods for program and curricular integration, and discuss the results of program impact assessment.