| Sweet Briar College offers students
a chance to tackle real-world problems
by Heather
B. Hayes
for Virginia Business
June 2006
Sweet Briar College has joined
Smith College in a very select group: They are the
only women’s
colleges in the country offering engineering programs.
Sweet Briar officials say they started their program last
fall after realizing that students wanted more opportunities
to prepare for professional careers. Nine students are
enrolled in the program. Twelve more (including a couple
of transfer students) are expected to participate in the
second class this fall. Program Director Kurt C. Schulz,
a mechanical engineer brought in from the College of the
Pacific, expects to eventually have 40 to 60 students enrolled.
He says that Sweet Briar’s liberal arts concept and
small-college environment offer great benefits for an engineering
program. He describes Sweet Briar’s program
as nurturing and close-knit. Classes are small, and
students
get many
opportunities for leadership roles. All students
in the program are required to participate in internships.
Beginning next spring, students
also will be required to take an interdisciplinary
studies class that will
be team-taught
by engineering, humanities and environmental-science
professors. Students will investigate a real-world
problem in Guatemala.
They then will design an engineering solution while
learning about the nation’s culture, political
system and environmental issues. Students finally
will travel to
Guatemala to build the project.
“Coming out of the door,
our students should definitely excel in communications
skills and in understanding the
whole picture rather than just the technical
parts,” says
Schulz. “A lot of engineering schools try to offer
those kinds of skills, but it’s tough to do in a
large program. We’re small enough to provide
the opportunities for a truly well-rounded engineering
education.”
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