Page 166 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11338.html

CAPTURING THE IMAGINATION 149

• Promote extra-university partnerships. The new educational
metaphor will require more involvement with state and local
government, the nonprofit sector and industry. These deeper
and broader multisector partnerships will have a number of
ancillary benefits for students.
• Develop international alliances to enhance partnerships. Ben-
efits include: preparing students educationally and profession-
ally for the world arena in which they will be working and the
transnational dimensions of the challenges they will face; over-
coming the insularity of the U.S. engineering education com-
munity; and increasing the diversity of the student body.
Women, for example, are significantly overrepresented in most
“study abroad” programs. If we choose partners and topics care-
fully (e.g., working closely with partner universities around the
world), internationalizing student projects can be a strategy for
increasing ethnic and cultural diversity.
• Continue (albeit with some modifications) the culminating se-
nior thesis/design project, either as an individual or as part of a
team. Students must have the experience of completing and
presenting a substantive body of work before they move to the
next stage of their lives.

An undergraduate engineering education based on participation in
multidisciplinary teams working on major, or grand, challenges will have
a variety of ancillary benefits. Students will develop strong leadership,
communication, and teamwork skills, cross-cultural and cross-national
awareness, and most important, confidence in their ability to contrib-
ute to the science and engineering community.
In the new educational setting, faculty will experience the intellec-
tual excitement of learning new things and building new partnerships
and will be able to focus more energy on the things they really care
about, such as contributing to important research, making a real differ-
ence in young people’s lives, and contributing to society. The emotional
rewards for faculty are a key element in a transformed educational envi-
ronment.
If the new educational environment is carefully constructed, it can
also benefit institution in many ways: by increasing the credibility of
the institution with stakeholders as university research is targeted to-
ward solving local societal problems; by establishing better partnerships

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