Program

Global awareness and fluency in culture and language are critical to future engineers.

Engineering in a global context is the primary expansion of the engineering consulting industry now and for the forseeable future. Engineering consulting firms have been expanding their international portfolios for over a decade. Today, the largest engineering firms earn over 50% of their income from internationl projects. There are urgent global problems (both short and long term) that can and should be addressed by engineers with global training.

Research endeavors require global engineers to be able to collaborate with and lead international, multicultural teams. Engineering design and production are likewise impacted by the reality that sales and markets are global. Engineers working in global sales need to be versed in local and global customs.

The Global Engineering Residential Academic Program is designed to prepare you for this global marketplace of ideas.

This program gives you the opportunity to stand out from the crowd by integrating your humanities and social sciences hours into your engineering coursework and by bringing to your internships and job interviews a clearly differentiated skill set above and beyond your technical skills.

Many of our engineering students fully appreciate these new global conditions in the profession and seek opportunities to gain international experience despite the constraints of their highly-structured and demanding majors. They also report a desire to broaden their knowledge by experiencing international culture, mastery of a second language, and IT-driven international communication and collaboration.

The College of Engineering’s First-Year and Graduating Senior surveys indicate that students are highly motivated to focus on global engineering as a growth field and as an area of crucial personal development. Students who intend to or already participate in Engineers Without Borders and the International Engineering Certificate welcome the opportunity to speak their target foreign language within a community of students with shared interests, both as incoming freshmen and as returning upper-division students.

It can be difficult to schedule and adequately prepare for a study abroad experience within the constraints of the engineering curricula. The Global Engineering RAP provides students with the opportunity to practice, consolidate, and improve their foreign language communication skills in a supportive, immersive environment with resident native speakers. It complements many students’ choice to fulfill their humanities and social sciences requirements through foreign language coursework.

About the Resident Academic Director

Diane Sieber is Associate Dean for Education in the College of Engineering and Applied Science. Having grown up in Spain, she is fluent in Spanish and French, the first two target languages of the Global Engineering RAP, and has extensive international experience. She was formerly a tenured associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Diane has received a number of major teaching awards: she is a Presidents Teaching Scholar, a Carnegie Fellow, and has been awarded the BFA Teaching Excellence Award, the SOAR Teaching Excellence Award, the GTP Best Should Teach award and 16 other awards and citations for teaching excellence.

Dr. Sieber was the co-director of the campus ATLAS Institute (The Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society) for many years; in that capacity, she has taught interactive design and media production, computer programming, as well as the social implications and impacts of new and emerging information communications technologies.