Abstract:

International experiences have long been recognized as significant enhancements to a student’s education. Study abroad programs abound, and the enrichment gained from these experiences is significant. Because of the rigors of engineering curricula, however, study abroad opportunities are rarely taken advantage of by engineering students. This is likely due to the fact that these curricula don’t typically have room for the kinds of study abroad options available, causing an inevitable extension of the time to degree for these students. Another factor dissuading many participating in study abroad opportunities is the expense. At the same time, the global economy and the proliferation of multinational corporations are creating more and more opportunities for professional engineers to interact with teammates in other parts of the world. It seems self-evident that providing engineering students international experiences can help to better prepare these students for the multinational workplace many will be entering upon graduation. For several years, the University of Colorado Colorado Springs has provided these international experiences to its engineering students in a number of ways, most notably through its capstone design course. The overarching goal of the capstone design course is to provide the opportunity for the students to develop the “soft skills” that will be critical in their professional lives as engineers, including both written and oral communication, team skills, planning and project management, etc. This is accomplished by having external project sponsors, most commonly engineering companies, bring real problems that the students will address as a team. For some of the students, their project sponsor is a foreign company and their team includes students for a foreign university. Over the five year partnership with Linkoping University in Sweden, joint teams have addressed many problems for different Swedish companies. Feedback from both universities and the participating students has been universally positive, and as the story of these successes has spread, more foreign universities have expressed the desire to set up similar partnerships to afford their students similar opportunities. This paper discusses the successes of these international collaborations to date, the current expansion of activities, and the longer term plan for building out these kinds of experiences for more and more engineering students around the world. A road map for building similar partnerships is offered as is a vision for a consortium construct that can sustainably provide these kinds of opportunities more broadly.

Keywords:

International collaboration, engineering education, capstone.