Sin El Agua No Hay Vida: 'Without Water There Is No Life'; Providing Engineering Undergraduates Opportunities for Real-Time Learning for Student Persistence and Retention

摘要

Providing engineering undergraduates opportunities to apply their classroom-based learning into real-world situations enhances their understanding of the disciplines they will soon practice, but also contributes to a multi-stakeholder perspective that highlights the human side of engineering. The authors designed a multi-disciplinary pilot senior design project that incorporated classroom and field-based experiences in an international setting. This project provides participating students the ability to attend to global challenges such as water scarcity, renewable energy, food security, and public health, but also opportunities to partner with government officials, university faculty, professional engineers, and civil society. As Russell, Hancock, and McCullough have argued, undergraduate participation in hands-on research is "widely believed to encourage students to pursue advanced degrees and careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematic fields." A 2003 report by Treverton and Bikson concluded that "to effectively exercise leadership in the global workplace, employees must demonstrate... a multidimensional and well-integrated repertoire of skills that include professional or technical knowledge related to the organization's core business; managerial ability that includes effective interpersonal and teamwork skills; a strategic understanding of their organization and industry in a global context; and...cross-cultural experience." International engineering research experiences and learning by doing encourages and enhances the skill-building necessary for twenty-first century engineers. The goal of this project was simple, take undergraduate engineering and liberal arts students from the United States to Latin America for the expressed purpose of exposing them to cultural and practical experiences they could not have on their own campuses. Over three years (2011-2014), students traveled to Latin America and consulted with community members, interviewed professional engineers, and designed a complementary water system for a small rural community in Ecuador. The design had to be sustainable and environmentally and socially sound. They used these experiences as the basis for their senior design projects, capitalizing on the experiences they had to bring real-world applicability to their work. For those students who had the international experience (not all could travel, so some participated only in campus-based activities), they stated that it changed the way they "saw" engineering. It fostered a belief in engineering as a "helping" discipline. Projects like Sin el agua no hay vida "Without water there is no life" afford engineering students opportunities to work in multidisciplinary teams, experience engineering in practice, and expose them to global challenges.