Industry Internships As A Tool For Curriculum Development

Industry surveys indicate that new engineering graduates lack important skills. University curricula have been slow to respond to industry needs. In the summer of 1997 I participated in a month-long industrial internship. While opportunity was provided for making research contacts, the main purpose was to provide first hand exposure to what engineers do and what skills they need. By expanding this type of internship opportunity to involve more faculty, MTU hopes to accelerate the pace of curricular change. This paper describes the activities that comprised this internship as well as the skills observed to be most important. With a few exceptions, my list of skills matches the lists derived from employer surveys. Based on these observations, my recommendations for curriculum change are: (1) provide more opportunities for students to develop the soft skills (for example, by requiring more practical team projects); (2) explicitly teach process skills, such as problem solving and project management; (3) emphasize the basics in engineering science courses and how to apply them to a variety of problems; (4) offer more systems courses to help students deal with the complicated products and organizations they will encounter. The internship has impacted my teaching and service activities in several ways. The paper concludes with some suggestions for more tightly integrating the internship to curriculum development.