The end of the semester brings more than just finals—it marks the culmination of months of hard work, collaboration, and real-world impact for QUEST students across all cohorts.

As the semester has come to a close, let’s take some time to congratulate everyone for all of the things they have accomplished! From Cohort 41 students wrapping up their QUEST journey with presenting their capstone projects at the QUEST Conference to students in Cohort 44 completing their product redesign projects, there’s been no shortage of impressive work. Today, let’s shine a spotlight on Cohort 43 and their journey through BMGT/ENES 390H: Designing Innovative Systems.

Last week, Cohort 43 students presented their final deliverables—client presentations and poster sessions—marking the end of their first real-world consulting experience in QUEST. I got a chance to speak with Melanie Chen and Bhavini Pandey about their projects and their thoughts on the new version of the class.

The DMAIC Framework

The new version of BMGT/ENES 390H taught by Dr. Tony Barber, which is now the second course in QUEST’s four-course sequence, is structured around DMAIC—Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control—a five-phase method used to optimize processes. At each phase, students learn about relevant industry tools, apply those skills to their client projects, and then demonstrate their knowledge through a toll gate presentation. The students spend the entire semester working through the DMAIC process for their assigned department on campus, allowing them to go deeper into their on-campus projects (previously, these projects were only 4-5 weeks).

A Student-Centered Social Media Strategy

Bhavini Pandey and her team, the One QUEST, worked with the University of Maryland’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering to boost student engagement. Given a broad issue, they used the 5 Whys Analysis, a tool they learned during the Define phase, to find the root cause: an inactive social media presence. 

“Halfway through our project, we realized that we should survey marketing students”, said Pandey. “We ended up iterating a lot between Measure and Analyze as we gathered more data.”

The team proposed hiring interns for specifically managing the department’s social media platforms. For Pandey, the toll gates kept her group on track. “At this stage of QUEST, while you’re getting used to consulting, the rigid course structure prevented us from jumping directly into the solution, especially after the Define and Measure phases.”

Optimizing Bus Replacement

Melanie Chen and her group, the Department of QUESTportation, worked with the University of Maryland’s Department of Transportation Services (DOTS) to determine the optimal replacement age for the university buses—beyond the standard 20-year benchmark—to reduce unnecessary maintenance costs.

In the Define phase, “we learned that our client had no framework to determine the age,” Chen said. “We met with them weekly to discuss our ideas.” The team created a model that calculates the replacement age and minimizes the average annual maintenance cost for each bus. 

Chen’s favorite phase was Control: “It was nice to look back on everything we did and figure out how to maintain our solution in the long term. We designed our model to take in different variables, like a specific bus’s data, to generate different results for multiple scenarios.”

Regardless of which QUEST course you completed this semester, it’s clear that every student pushed themselves, learned new skills, and made meaningful contributions. Whether it was your first presentation or your final capstone showcase, you should be proud of how far you’ve come. From all of us at QUEST, we wish you a great summer!