For over 20 years Illinois Tech’s Interprofessional Projects (IPRO) Program at the Kaplan Institute has offered undergraduate students hands-on, interdisciplinary, experiential opportunities to apply innovation methods to contemporary challenges. All undergraduate students will take two IPRO courses while at Illinois Tech providing them the opportunity to work with faculty and students outside of their college and major. As a program focused on innovation we are continuously updating and evolving the program. There are two IPRO formats students may choose from:

IPRO workshops: This new class format allows sponsors to engage with a large, diverse set of students from Illinois Tech. The sponsor organization will offer a challenge and then 50 to 100 students (divided into small inter-disciplinary teams of 3 to 5 students) will spend the semester developing either a working prototype or a rigorous research paper based on the challenge. We will work with individual sponsors to design an appropriate engagement including opportunities for recruiting and employee / student mentoring.

IPRO special projects: this is the “classic” IPRO format, a rigorous research and development project that is specified by one or more full time faculty members. A small group of students (between 10 to 15) work closely with the faculty on all aspects of the project.