Introduction To Engineering Program: A Three Week Summer Camp For Rising Seniors In High School

The Introduction to Engineering Program (IEP) is a three-week summer camp for high school students who have just completed their junior year. Students come from all around the country, and in some cases from abroad. IEP’s purpose is to provide participants with an overview of all fields in engineering, while giving the students a taste of college life, a look at career opportunities, and a chance to meet professional engineers as well as engineering faculty. Students work on several projects, attend lectures, write reports, code programs, give presentations, do problem solving and design, go on field trips, and interact with a very diverse group of peers. In this paper we describe the IEP program, and provide an overview of its selection process and its structure and content. We examine how effective the program has been, and describe some of the changes that have been implemented recently. We present, for the very first time, some valuable statistics gathered over eight years. We discuss whether the program is an effective recruiting tool, be it into engineering in general or into our institution in particular. We conclude with some recommendations.