This paper discusses one part of our attempts at Lehigh University to put active, inquiry-based, collaborative, multidisciplinary experiences at the center of undergraduate education, starting in the freshman year. We briefly outline the goals, history, structure, and our evaluation of our Integrated Business and Engineering Freshman Workshop, a team-project-based learning course emphasizing entrepreneurial product development. The main goal of the Workshop, and the interdisciplinary curricula which it leads into, is to enable graduates to move more rapidly along their chosen career paths, graduating both competent in their functional disciplines-whether business or engineering-and better prepared for long-term success. Freshmen, by and large, come as a blank slate in terms of disciplinary biases and expectations about college "coursework." By working in teams on original entrepreneurial, multi-disciplinary product development projects from the first year, students not only become multi-functional, self-directed and team-oriented, but better understand the context of the latter courses in their curricula. The program emphasizes higher-order skill development, including: problem and task identification in ill-defined problems; decision making under uncertainty and lack of information; integrating, connecting, and reflecting on diverse areas of knowledge; and written and oral communication. We also evaluate our progress based on several related sources of qualitative and quantitative assessment information. The paper concludes by exploring the major issues and lessons learned in program implementation.
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