Abstract:

As technology advances at a staggering pace, there is more and more pressure on higher education to train students to be able to understand it, contribute to its development and innovate at an equally fast pace. The Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, as all higher education institutions with an international reach and a strong national foothold, is fully engaged on the way to match and adapt its curricula to these social, economic and technological demands. As a concequence, and faithful to its mission, TUC-N give prominence to engineering and science subjects in all specialism curricula it offers its students. However, there is growing evidence of the need to complement engineering subjects with humanities subjects, especially those related to communication skills. The present study explores the cross-disciplinary aspects of some humanities subjects taught to engineering students in TUC-N. Languages, communication and intrercultural studies are core skills targeted here. The complex interplay of these skills is the main reason they are included in the mainstream curriculum of engineering students. Globalization trends on the job market, internationalisation of higer education, enhanced access to information from global sources are factors that call for offering graduates all possible opportunities to learn skills that will make them highly employable in the current social-economic environment. We report here some of the solutions found in the curriculum offered to TUC-N students which involve teaching a range of interconnected humanities subjects to support the balance between ‘hard and soft’ skills so necessary to graduates of STEM specialisations.

Keywords:

Interdisciplinarity, Culture, Communication, Language for special purposes, Technology.