Engineering the engineering program: the year of discovery

Abstract

Retention is an issue that has been faced by many engineering colleges due to the difficulties and lack of knowledge about what it really is to be an engineer. The first 3 years of the course are particularly intense and hard. A way to overcome this period might be achieved by implementing a new kind of course, more enticing and dynamic. That is the idea of COPEC’s engineering education research team, to embed a program with a more interesting activity for students in the first year. It is what has been named after “The Year of Discovery”, a short-term workshop in order to show students the possibilities of performing as engineers in a global environment – a project developed for a private university, in order to decrease the retention rate in their engineering programs.