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The Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) Program matches teams of undergraduates in engineering with not-for-profit, educational, and government organizations in the community. The student teams work closely with their partner organizations to identify ways that technology can enable them to improve their internal operations or the services that they offer to the community. The teams then design, develop, construct, deploy and support systems which provide these improved operations and services.
The more than 250 students currently enrolled in the EPICS Program at Purdue are organized into 22 teams. The organizations they work with include Habitat for Humanity, Imagination Station, Klondike and Burtsfield Elementary Schools, the Lafayette Adult Reading Academy, the Lafayette Crisis Center, Purdue's Office of the Dean of Students, Purdue's Speech-Language and Audiology Clinics, Purdue Farms, and the Tippecanoe County Historical Association.
The student teams are interdisciplinary; students from ECE, CE, ChE, CS, IE, ME, Education, and several disciplines within Liberal Arts, are currently enrolled. The teams are also vertically integrated, which means that each one is a mix of freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. When a senior on a project graduates, a freshman or sophomore is added. This provides the continuity required for the completion of large-scale, long-term projects that provide signifcant benefits to the community.
The National EPICS Program was launched in 1999 with a grant from the National Science Foundation and with continuing funds from the Corporation for National Service. The National EPICS program is now a coalition of many universities in the United States and the University of Auckland in New Zealand. In addition to Purdue, EPICS programs now exist at the following universities (alphabetical order): Butler University, Columbia University, Dartmouth University, Georgia Tech, Illinois Institute of Technology, Penn State University, San Jose State University, the University of Auckland (New Zealand), the University of California - Merced, the University of California - San Diego, the University of Dayton, the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin - Madison, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. These EPICS sites work together to support and grow the EPICS program and to establish national scale EPICS projects. One of these national-scale efforts is the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative.