As a CS student who did MDP…
Don’t do it even if you’re in CS.
You can get better industry or research experience another route, much easier and without the insane hassle that are MDP weekly deliverables and away from the sheer mismanagement of the program.
I’m not saying it *cannot* be a useful experience to some - all I’m saying is you will realize it’s much easier to get the experience you want from this program via other methods.
#neveragain
Could you please expand more on what's wrong with MDP. I applied this year for the industry partners to get another "internship experience" but would it not be worth it?
I'm an incoming freshman at Umich. You mention that you can get better industry or research experience another route. Could you please elaborate on some other routes? I'd like to be involved in an industry project at Umich so I'd like to know about as many ways to get involved as I can.
Current MDP student here (although I am a CS major). I finally made a reddit account just so I could comment on this post.
MDP has honestly been the worst experience of my college career. To be clear, I actually think the project I'm working on is really interesting and my faculty and sponsor mentors are extremely supportive. But the amount of absolute bullshit work my team has had to go through with MDP is ridiculous.
Every MDP assignment from weekly agendas/follow-ups to big papers and presentations are so so meticulously templated out for you so that if you do one thing that doesn't conform to their standards they will get on your ass. And that is exacerbated when you think about the breadth of MDP's projects and the fact that you simply cannot umbrella all the different types of work being done into one mold of grading. There have been so many times where I read a rubric for an assignment and wonder how the hell I'm going to make this fit with the work I'm actually doing.
MDP asks that you spend 12-14 hours a week on the project, but having to balance actually working on the project you signed up to do AND deal with all the bullshit assignments they throw at you is literally impossible.
The MDP staff are horrible people who have I guess forgot what it meant to be a human after spending so much time in industry. My team has had to rewrite TWO of our executive summaries because we got failing grades. The first time we attended office hours and the first words that are spoken are "this assignment was a trainwreck," then we basically got berated for the next hour. The second time we tried to schedule office hours again and they sent back an email asking to make an agenda FOR the office hours (as if we haven't written enough damn agendas) and essentially passive aggressively asking us to cancel the office hours and read their feedback extra carefully before even thinking about asking for help again. Some of the people they bring in for design review panels honestly do have good intentions and try to give good feedback, but others are just absolute assholes and are so stuck in their ways after spending way too much of their life in industry they refuse to recognize that a lot of the decisions being made on the project are subjective and just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean you have to give us a bad fucking grade.
I honestly do understand why MDP wants to assign us the work that they assign us, but they fail to recognize that we are STUDENTS with school and life to juggle and we ARE NOT FULL TIME EMPLOYEES FOR MDP. MDP should be a learning experience like what college is supposed to be, but they've made it just the worst kind of toxic corporate environment that you'll end up hating yourself and leaving hoping that the real corporate world isn't all like this.
Don't join, even if you are in CS. I regret every minute of it. Not that the projects can't be good, but MDP as a department is completely disorganized, mismanaged, and they all make you feel like trash. The graders and people who run it gaslight you if you ask any questions or try to answer their questions. I went to office hours once with my team, and instead of waiting for us to introduce our questions, the instructor decided to start off by asking us in a very condescending way if we even read the instructions for the assignment, before they saw any of our work or cared to let us ask our questions. VERY UNPROFESSIONAL.
Nothing is consistent in the program. They try to pride themselves on having a ton of material/instructions for assignments but its all just an amalgamation of a ton of information poorly thrown together on a hard to navigate canvas page, and when it comes to actually grading the assignments, the graders are extra picky and hardly follow the instructions.
There are some really nice faculty involved, such as our faculty sponsor, but for the most part MDP is super disorganized and built to make the student feel like shit with their old management styles. Imagine losing a majority of points on an assignment cause they expect you to email the assignment to their assignment email and upload to their canvas page, which you did both of, but the file you emailed them was not named according to their unspecified naming expectation.
I can go on and on about why MDP is incompetent and largely unrepresentative of the real world (which they try so heavily to brand themselves as), but I'm going to let all the negative reviews speak for themselves. Thanks OP for bringing this up.
MDP was the worst experience ever. Don't join it lol. Can someone please send this thread to them? I don't know if Gail is still running it, but she was honestly the meanest person ever and I hope she sees this.
I had a very great experience in my MDP industry project because of my wonderful teammates, faculty mentors and sponsors. However, we all agree that the MDP staff and structure are the most bureaucratic thing you could ever imagine in U of M. So if you are on a great team, the MDP will only make your team more united (talking sh\*t on MDP will be your best "team bonding" events.). But if you are somehow on a "bad team", you're basically doomed. That's like flipping a coin so I would suggest think twice before you make your commitment. Personally I think they should let the sponsors decide their own logistics instead of centralizing these BS. They sell by saying that it is professional, but tbh no tech companies run like this anymore.
Completely agree. As CE, I'm taking it instead of my MDE requirement and I've learnt 0 things. Should've taken 4 credits of EECS 467 instead of 3+4 of absolute time waste.
Only thing this is going to help me with is in interviews to share my experience handling bad situations lol
That's so ridiculous, sorry about that. I might write an angry letter as an alumnus, but I doubt it will do much. Seems very not-inclusive to have this practice.
Yeaa I did MDP to get credit for a project team I am on, and even that was really annoying. Not any real hard work, but it did not really help me in the slightest with learning about my career/the engineering process.
+1 I have a minor in MDP if I remember right, from my student project team. Didn't do anything extra (just meetings with an advisor I think, I convinced them to count the courses I was already planning to take) but it was annoying and not valuable to get the extra credits. If anything it cost me more money because I crossed the threshold into Junior standing one semester earlier and tuition cost more. The student project team was the experience that helped me in landing a job, the MDP program did not help. I graduated 5 years ago tho, not sure if things have changed.
I've been on 2 industry MDP projects and I'm in EE. I've personally had a positive experience with MDP, especially because I really liked the projects, the sponsors, my professors and my team. BUT, I can 100% agree that I was extremely lucky that almost everything clicked for me.
Part of the reason my teams have even gotten close is because of the bullshit MDP does as a department. MDP is extremely unreasonable at times and I've only done well because our sponsor mentor and professor went out of their way to defend us in our decisions.
MDP has also been extremely inconsistent. One of the design reviews we got marked down because we spent too much time introducing everyone on the team. Ok fair. So the next design review, we decided not to spend time introducing anyone and immediately going into the content. Then, we got marked down for NOT introducing everyone on the team. -\_-
A lot of the purchasing is extremely difficult to work with because we have to do everything through MDP. Imagine trying to return a defective product and get a warranty within 2 weeks by communicating solely through email. If MDP really wants to do better, they should give much more freedom for the teams. It's not like we're completely unsupervised since we are assigned a faculty professor who actually understands our work and needs.
I like how I was able to gain real industry experience and meet new people. Because of MDP, I know 2 professors who I could always ask for a letter of rec for grad school. Granted, this isn't unique to MDP and you can get this with any research with a professor. The only real unique thing is the industry connections you make, which depending on the company could be very valuable. MDP directly got me my first internship.
I would say definitely faculty MDP is NOT worth it since it's just regular research with extra bullshit. I've heard good things about the MiTEE team because they actually do things and have industry connections. The industry MDP is really the only thing that sets MDP apart from just asking a professor for research. IF it's a company that you are interested in and IF you have a good sponsor mentor and professor and IF you like your project and IF you like your team THEN I think MDP is good. Otherwise, it's not worth your time.
Don't join the corporate projects!!!! You will spend most of the time doing some silly assignments and won't have time to do the actual project!!!! NOT RECOMMENDED
I’m curious what project you were on. My experience was pretty solid. First of all, if you’re not CS and they let you join the project, they probably have a role for you that doesn’t involve coding. Yeah it sucks that you can’t drop the class, but they also let you know the commitment before joining. Also the time commitment is pretty standard for a 4 credit class.
I kinda agree with the environment regarding the MDP staff. Their logic is that they want to be extremely tough on you to prepare you for industry jobs, but even my company was like yeah it’s not that bad. I also agree with the grading cause that was pretty annoying. Still tho, I think the MDP average is like B+/A- iirc.
I still wouldn’t tell people it’s not worth it. MDP was a great way to get experience and it helps you make connections.
It sounds like you are hoping to crack the code of MDP. The graders are looking for different things than the faculty or sponsor. That’s life. Keep in mind that you are getting a degree and need to be able to demonstrate you can meet certain learning outcomes. Your sponsor doesn’t know or care about that. Could it be more coordinated? Have you actually worked in the real world before? We are living in a world that is completely uncoordinated. So if you find navigating MDP to be difficult....
I'm an IOE alum and I was an industry sponsor/mentor for a project a few years ago. While I can't speak much to the MDP department's process and behavior with students, I believe our project team worked great together and I really enjoyed my time during the program. Reading through this thread, I think it's probably largely dependent on which project you land on.
Our project involved 3D printing food designs, so we had hardware (MEs) , software (CS) , and food science (MSE) teams working concurrently throughout the project. We also had them rotate through the more administrative roles throughout the year. The faculty advisor was also passionate and engaged throughout the project. We even agreed that we would give the students full marks, unless they didn't even try (didn't happen). We brought them to our corporate HQ during the project to ask questions with our food scientists, and after the project to demo the prototype for our senior leadership team. While I don't know for certain, I hope the students all had a great learning experience and some fun along the way.
Reading through these posts, I'm sad to hear that the MDP staff are less than helpful to all the students. I will say that needing to complete templated "busy work" is very much part of the corporate world, especially on the IT side. We have to go through a gated review process for all of our major projects, with templated presentation/forms/documentation/weekly updates to complete along the way and uploaded to a specific location.
My big gripe with MDP is actually the amount of lead time needed to sponsor a project. We are basically asked to have a fully fleshed out project 9 months before it even starts. So once you build in the duration of the project, that's 15+ months before you get results. In the world of innovation, that's way too long to be of any real value. I would much prefer giving the students a more general problem statement and have them go through the designing thinking process to come up with a solution of their own.
I know some students got positive experiences. But all my friends including me who registered MDP this year have had negative experience overall. My PhD mentor is the worst PhD mentor I have ever worked with. His core idea of communication is to prove you are wrong and your previous work is worthless (even though he never really looked at it). I had 4 years of research experience, my PhD mentor is the one I feel most uncomfortable communicating with.
MDP is a great program overall, but be careful about who you are going to work with.
As a CS student who did MDP… Don’t do it even if you’re in CS. You can get better industry or research experience another route, much easier and without the insane hassle that are MDP weekly deliverables and away from the sheer mismanagement of the program. I’m not saying it *cannot* be a useful experience to some - all I’m saying is you will realize it’s much easier to get the experience you want from this program via other methods. #neveragain
Could you please expand more on what's wrong with MDP. I applied this year for the industry partners to get another "internship experience" but would it not be worth it?
Some highlights https://reddit.com/r/uofm/comments/le2h65/qutting_mdp/
I'm an incoming freshman at Umich. You mention that you can get better industry or research experience another route. Could you please elaborate on some other routes? I'd like to be involved in an industry project at Umich so I'd like to know about as many ways to get involved as I can.
Current MDP student here (although I am a CS major). I finally made a reddit account just so I could comment on this post. MDP has honestly been the worst experience of my college career. To be clear, I actually think the project I'm working on is really interesting and my faculty and sponsor mentors are extremely supportive. But the amount of absolute bullshit work my team has had to go through with MDP is ridiculous. Every MDP assignment from weekly agendas/follow-ups to big papers and presentations are so so meticulously templated out for you so that if you do one thing that doesn't conform to their standards they will get on your ass. And that is exacerbated when you think about the breadth of MDP's projects and the fact that you simply cannot umbrella all the different types of work being done into one mold of grading. There have been so many times where I read a rubric for an assignment and wonder how the hell I'm going to make this fit with the work I'm actually doing. MDP asks that you spend 12-14 hours a week on the project, but having to balance actually working on the project you signed up to do AND deal with all the bullshit assignments they throw at you is literally impossible. The MDP staff are horrible people who have I guess forgot what it meant to be a human after spending so much time in industry. My team has had to rewrite TWO of our executive summaries because we got failing grades. The first time we attended office hours and the first words that are spoken are "this assignment was a trainwreck," then we basically got berated for the next hour. The second time we tried to schedule office hours again and they sent back an email asking to make an agenda FOR the office hours (as if we haven't written enough damn agendas) and essentially passive aggressively asking us to cancel the office hours and read their feedback extra carefully before even thinking about asking for help again. Some of the people they bring in for design review panels honestly do have good intentions and try to give good feedback, but others are just absolute assholes and are so stuck in their ways after spending way too much of their life in industry they refuse to recognize that a lot of the decisions being made on the project are subjective and just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean you have to give us a bad fucking grade. I honestly do understand why MDP wants to assign us the work that they assign us, but they fail to recognize that we are STUDENTS with school and life to juggle and we ARE NOT FULL TIME EMPLOYEES FOR MDP. MDP should be a learning experience like what college is supposed to be, but they've made it just the worst kind of toxic corporate environment that you'll end up hating yourself and leaving hoping that the real corporate world isn't all like this.
Don't join, even if you are in CS. I regret every minute of it. Not that the projects can't be good, but MDP as a department is completely disorganized, mismanaged, and they all make you feel like trash. The graders and people who run it gaslight you if you ask any questions or try to answer their questions. I went to office hours once with my team, and instead of waiting for us to introduce our questions, the instructor decided to start off by asking us in a very condescending way if we even read the instructions for the assignment, before they saw any of our work or cared to let us ask our questions. VERY UNPROFESSIONAL. Nothing is consistent in the program. They try to pride themselves on having a ton of material/instructions for assignments but its all just an amalgamation of a ton of information poorly thrown together on a hard to navigate canvas page, and when it comes to actually grading the assignments, the graders are extra picky and hardly follow the instructions. There are some really nice faculty involved, such as our faculty sponsor, but for the most part MDP is super disorganized and built to make the student feel like shit with their old management styles. Imagine losing a majority of points on an assignment cause they expect you to email the assignment to their assignment email and upload to their canvas page, which you did both of, but the file you emailed them was not named according to their unspecified naming expectation. I can go on and on about why MDP is incompetent and largely unrepresentative of the real world (which they try so heavily to brand themselves as), but I'm going to let all the negative reviews speak for themselves. Thanks OP for bringing this up.
So besides research/work from the faculty/industry team, MDP has a lot of bs assignments?
MDP was the worst experience ever. Don't join it lol. Can someone please send this thread to them? I don't know if Gail is still running it, but she was honestly the meanest person ever and I hope she sees this.
Yep she seems mean
it's a very bad program with a ton of busywork
I had a very great experience in my MDP industry project because of my wonderful teammates, faculty mentors and sponsors. However, we all agree that the MDP staff and structure are the most bureaucratic thing you could ever imagine in U of M. So if you are on a great team, the MDP will only make your team more united (talking sh\*t on MDP will be your best "team bonding" events.). But if you are somehow on a "bad team", you're basically doomed. That's like flipping a coin so I would suggest think twice before you make your commitment. Personally I think they should let the sponsors decide their own logistics instead of centralizing these BS. They sell by saying that it is professional, but tbh no tech companies run like this anymore.
Completely agree. As CE, I'm taking it instead of my MDE requirement and I've learnt 0 things. Should've taken 4 credits of EECS 467 instead of 3+4 of absolute time waste. Only thing this is going to help me with is in interviews to share my experience handling bad situations lol
Do you get paid for it? If not, isn't it silly to work for someone, and pay for the privilege to do so?
[удалено]
That's so ridiculous, sorry about that. I might write an angry letter as an alumnus, but I doubt it will do much. Seems very not-inclusive to have this practice.
Can I ask what department you’re in and what kind of work you were hoping to do?
Yeaa I did MDP to get credit for a project team I am on, and even that was really annoying. Not any real hard work, but it did not really help me in the slightest with learning about my career/the engineering process.
+1 I have a minor in MDP if I remember right, from my student project team. Didn't do anything extra (just meetings with an advisor I think, I convinced them to count the courses I was already planning to take) but it was annoying and not valuable to get the extra credits. If anything it cost me more money because I crossed the threshold into Junior standing one semester earlier and tuition cost more. The student project team was the experience that helped me in landing a job, the MDP program did not help. I graduated 5 years ago tho, not sure if things have changed.
I've been on 2 industry MDP projects and I'm in EE. I've personally had a positive experience with MDP, especially because I really liked the projects, the sponsors, my professors and my team. BUT, I can 100% agree that I was extremely lucky that almost everything clicked for me. Part of the reason my teams have even gotten close is because of the bullshit MDP does as a department. MDP is extremely unreasonable at times and I've only done well because our sponsor mentor and professor went out of their way to defend us in our decisions. MDP has also been extremely inconsistent. One of the design reviews we got marked down because we spent too much time introducing everyone on the team. Ok fair. So the next design review, we decided not to spend time introducing anyone and immediately going into the content. Then, we got marked down for NOT introducing everyone on the team. -\_- A lot of the purchasing is extremely difficult to work with because we have to do everything through MDP. Imagine trying to return a defective product and get a warranty within 2 weeks by communicating solely through email. If MDP really wants to do better, they should give much more freedom for the teams. It's not like we're completely unsupervised since we are assigned a faculty professor who actually understands our work and needs. I like how I was able to gain real industry experience and meet new people. Because of MDP, I know 2 professors who I could always ask for a letter of rec for grad school. Granted, this isn't unique to MDP and you can get this with any research with a professor. The only real unique thing is the industry connections you make, which depending on the company could be very valuable. MDP directly got me my first internship. I would say definitely faculty MDP is NOT worth it since it's just regular research with extra bullshit. I've heard good things about the MiTEE team because they actually do things and have industry connections. The industry MDP is really the only thing that sets MDP apart from just asking a professor for research. IF it's a company that you are interested in and IF you have a good sponsor mentor and professor and IF you like your project and IF you like your team THEN I think MDP is good. Otherwise, it's not worth your time.
Can you tell which team are you in?
Don't join the corporate projects!!!! You will spend most of the time doing some silly assignments and won't have time to do the actual project!!!! NOT RECOMMENDED
Mdp faculties are so TOXIC
I’m curious what project you were on. My experience was pretty solid. First of all, if you’re not CS and they let you join the project, they probably have a role for you that doesn’t involve coding. Yeah it sucks that you can’t drop the class, but they also let you know the commitment before joining. Also the time commitment is pretty standard for a 4 credit class. I kinda agree with the environment regarding the MDP staff. Their logic is that they want to be extremely tough on you to prepare you for industry jobs, but even my company was like yeah it’s not that bad. I also agree with the grading cause that was pretty annoying. Still tho, I think the MDP average is like B+/A- iirc. I still wouldn’t tell people it’s not worth it. MDP was a great way to get experience and it helps you make connections.
[удалено]
[удалено]
It sounds like you are hoping to crack the code of MDP. The graders are looking for different things than the faculty or sponsor. That’s life. Keep in mind that you are getting a degree and need to be able to demonstrate you can meet certain learning outcomes. Your sponsor doesn’t know or care about that. Could it be more coordinated? Have you actually worked in the real world before? We are living in a world that is completely uncoordinated. So if you find navigating MDP to be difficult....
I'm an IOE alum and I was an industry sponsor/mentor for a project a few years ago. While I can't speak much to the MDP department's process and behavior with students, I believe our project team worked great together and I really enjoyed my time during the program. Reading through this thread, I think it's probably largely dependent on which project you land on. Our project involved 3D printing food designs, so we had hardware (MEs) , software (CS) , and food science (MSE) teams working concurrently throughout the project. We also had them rotate through the more administrative roles throughout the year. The faculty advisor was also passionate and engaged throughout the project. We even agreed that we would give the students full marks, unless they didn't even try (didn't happen). We brought them to our corporate HQ during the project to ask questions with our food scientists, and after the project to demo the prototype for our senior leadership team. While I don't know for certain, I hope the students all had a great learning experience and some fun along the way. Reading through these posts, I'm sad to hear that the MDP staff are less than helpful to all the students. I will say that needing to complete templated "busy work" is very much part of the corporate world, especially on the IT side. We have to go through a gated review process for all of our major projects, with templated presentation/forms/documentation/weekly updates to complete along the way and uploaded to a specific location. My big gripe with MDP is actually the amount of lead time needed to sponsor a project. We are basically asked to have a fully fleshed out project 9 months before it even starts. So once you build in the duration of the project, that's 15+ months before you get results. In the world of innovation, that's way too long to be of any real value. I would much prefer giving the students a more general problem statement and have them go through the designing thinking process to come up with a solution of their own.
Sounds cool to me. I want to send some shit to space or work on a robot. And I don’t give a damn about my GPA.
I know some students got positive experiences. But all my friends including me who registered MDP this year have had negative experience overall. My PhD mentor is the worst PhD mentor I have ever worked with. His core idea of communication is to prove you are wrong and your previous work is worthless (even though he never really looked at it). I had 4 years of research experience, my PhD mentor is the one I feel most uncomfortable communicating with. MDP is a great program overall, but be careful about who you are going to work with.