Perspectives from Industry

Recent experiences have shown successes in three areas of collaboration: recruitment by increasing the attractiveness of engineering by defining, testing, sharing, and enabling best practices and collaborative initiatives to attract underrepresented populations, and reach families with little or no awareness of engineering, retention by jointly inventing and deploying ways of sustaining student commitment to, and enthusiasm and energy for engineering learning; and volume by sharing visibility, ideas, and efforts in defining locations and disciplines where an increase in capacity is justified by employment opportunities. The program was launched in 2003 by an interdisciplinary team of faculty in response to "The Engineer of 2020," a National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Committee on Engineering Education (CEE) initiative that calls for engineers of the future to see themselves more broadly as global citizens, leaders in business, and ethically grounded in their work In the HE program, students' aptitude for using CAD software and engineering calculations evolves into experiences focused on solving design problems that span cultural and societal issues, such as design and construction of a water system for a village in Honduras.