Systems Engineering and Product Development

ME 488 is about how real engineering products actually get built — not the clean textbook design problem, but the messy full lifecycle where reliability, manufacturability, cost, and risk all have to be negotiated alongside the actual engineering. You move through the stages of a development project via individual assignments and a sequence of case studies built around engineering failures, learning to think about verification, configuration management, and mass production the way industry actually does. It sits at the senior end of the ME curriculum as a bridge between coursework and how engineering is practiced in defense, aerospace, and manufacturing, where "did it work in the lab" is only the first question.