What is Global Preparedness? Arriving at Answers in Collaboration with Student Engineers Working with Underserved Communities Globally

Students have demonstrated increasing demand to use their engineering skills to address global societal problems. Also, the ABET criteria requires engineering programs to provide “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context.” These two factors have raised fundamental questions about how to effectively prepare engineering students to engage with underserved communities globally. This paper uses a case study approach to document the experiences of students of a global engineering course. This course offered students the unique opportunity to address sanitation and hygiene issues by working with a community rather than for it. The paper highlights curricular innovations that ensured ethical, sustainable collaboration with the underserved community while building the global preparedness of the student engineers. This is followed by the experiences of the student co-authors who share what they have learned and how they have found these lessons useful outside of the context of the class. Based on an analysis of these case studies, the paper concludes by proposing the creation of a global preparedness efficacy construct as a possible way to evaluate global preparedness of undergraduate engineering students.