At Purdue, EPICS is offered as a learning community to freshman students in the First Year Engineering program. The learning community program requires that students live in a specific university residence with other students in the EPICS program. Students are assigned roommates of the same gender and in the past Harrison Hall has been the location of the EPICS learning community. The EPICS students occupy most of a floor of Harrison (for men) but are split to separate towers by gender. In addition, students in the EPICS learning community will take some courses together, usually freshmen English (English 106) and the first part of the freshmen engineering course (previously ENGR195). Freshmen in EPICS are assigned to specific EPICS teams (not by roommate). These teams work with a community partner to meet a particular need. Some examples of teams include the Columbian Park Zoo team which designs enrichment devices for animals at the local zoo and the Habitat for Humanity team which helps to plan sustainable housing. EPICS functions as a class usually with a set number of lecture sessions to attend each semester and weekly lab time with teams. Documentation and design reviews are important parts of EPICS. Students learn to keep design notebooks and record project information. Near the midpoint and end of the semester, students present their work in a design review to professional engineers. These are very important events in EPICS and serve as a key time for students to receive feedback on their work. Students who enter EPICS as freshmen engineers are required to be part of the course portion only for the first semester, although they can opt to continue in future semesters.