Accreditation criteria and employer expectations increasingly require that engineering students obtain “real world” design experience before graduation. To enhance this experience for Materials Science and Engineering majors at the University of California, Davis, the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science offers a senior design course called Materials in Engineering Design (EMS 188). The central feature of the course is a collaborative design project that is taught jointly by department professors and an engineer from industry.  During the 2004-2005 school year, students worked together as a team to define, justify and develop a cost effective process for fusing RF glass–to-metal seal transitions into aluminum housings to produce a hermetic RF/microwave electronic package assembly (a “real” project of technical interest to Agilent Technologies).  To define and develop this process the students needed to consider the desired material properties, as dictated by the component assembly design, and how the material selection and joining process affects the properties.  In order to justify the project, the team was expected to address economic, intellectual property, regulatory and environmental/safety issues associated with the proposed process design and its development.  The team conducted experiments and tests at UC Davis necessary to evaluate the design and resulting properties of the glass-to-aluminum seal interfaces.  These included wetting evaluations and testing of glass transition temperatures.  The team conducted glass-to-metal seal process development, including furnace profiling and hermeticity testing, at Agilent facilities in Santa Rosa, California. Through applied research and testing the student team developed a reliable process for producing hermetic glass-to-metal seals in aluminum package housings.