Culture
From Engineering Honors
Contents |
The Culture of the Engineering Honors Program
or
"who we are working to be"
Excellence | Community | Opportunity | Curriculum | Intentionality
Excellence
As already stated, we have a very concrete understanding of excellence: it is the activity of individuals choosing to do excellent things. This means hard work and taking risks. It requires learning from others while remaining true to your own abilities, passions, instincts and goals.
For the ancient Greeks, the concept of excellence brought together three ideas: ability, purpose, and potential. Accordingly, the excellence of a horse was to be swift, of a shield to be reliable, of a foundation to support its structure.
- The question, therefore, we are asking is this: what does it mean for a student of engineering to be excellent?
Our answer, of course, includes all the common components of being an excellent engineer: technical expertise, foundational math and science knowledge, problem-solving skills, creative thinking, ethical responsibility, functioning on a team, etc. But even these have a profound individual element in respect to any particular student's ability, purpose and potential.
As a result, we are also, if not more, interested in what it means for you to pursue excellence--a unique person with all your own ambitions, personal history, and desires. That is, how do we tailor an educational experience that brings out your excellence as a function of your ability, purpose and potential. In designing a program that promotes this type of personal excellence, we understand that there has to be:
- a great deal of flexibility
- the culitvation of a community of professors and peers committed to excellence
- the opportunity for students to explore, experiment, and expect
- exposure to people who have chosen to do excellent things
- a commitment to you as an individual
We do not assume that your ultimate ambitions involve being a practicing engineer in the traditional sense. Some of our current Honors students want to teach, become politicians, be astronauts, do engineering development work, start companies, write plays, and get involved in national/international engineering policy discussions. Although our program only began in the Fall of 2007, this group of first and second-year students have already worked at the Stanford Particle Accelerator, taught in China, contributed to mathematical models of the mutation of HIV, worked on a water project in Peru with Engineers without Borders, led afterschool "engineering clubs" at local elementary and middle schools, served as peer tutors in physics and advanced math classes here at CU, as wells as be involved in various ongoing research in robotics, nano-technology, remote sensing, sustainable energy, computational models of developing economies, tissue research and various aspects of material science.
Community
Each year, we continue to build a community of talented students who deeply inspire, challenge, and support each other. Every study confirms that the success of university students is deeply enhanced or undermined by a student's primary peer group.
We are structuring our community to promote critical encounters at mutliple levels:
- with classmates entering the same year (having a common first-semester class, belonging to a small faculty mentoring group, living together in the Engineering Honors Program Residential Academic Program, etc.).
- with other Honors students both ahead and behind you (being part of recitation sections in the common first-semester class led by upper-division Honors students, participating in special Honors events; interacting with upper-division students who elect to live in the Residential Academic Program, etc.).
- with dedicated faculty--all self-selected educators who have a commitment to working closely with students and engaging them as individuals (first-year faculty mentor groups, research/thesis mentors, faculty leading special Honors courses, faculty involvement in special events, etc.).
To help foster this community from the moment you arrive on campus, all first-year Honors students will participate in the Engineering Honors Program Residential Academic Program in Andrews Hall. The University has invested close to 14 million dollars to completely rennovate Andrews Hall just for the Engineering Honors Program. It was completed this summer and will be ready for us in the Fall of 2009. This new facility, designed for first through fourth-year Engineering Honors students, will include special classrooms and study spaces, a variety of room options, a full common kitchen and , following the Oxford model, a residential faculty member and family (I,my wife and our two daughters have already moved in). It will also provide a great variety of very practical leadership opportunities. Andrews Hall will be one of four rennovated dorms in the Kittredge complex creating an even larger community of excellence, including the Arts and Sciences Honors Hall and the International Studies Program. Living in Andrews is required for the first year and optional after that.
Opportunity
Participation in the Honors Program will provide you with a wide range of valuable opportunities that include and go beyond the classroom. All engineering students are encouraged to do summer internships, participate in research, consider studying abroad, and develop relationships with their professors. In the Honors Program, there is a more coordinated and focused effort to match students with faculty mentors, appropriate internships, leadership opportunities, and research work. There will also be a series of special events that include industry leaders, faculty and college leadership, and special speakers. Consistent with our understanding of excellence, we want to provide you with the opportunities that directly match your particular abilities, ambitions, and potential. Depending on your major, funded research positions could begin as early as your first or second semester.
Perhaps the greatest opportunity of our program is the working and living together with wildly talented and ambitious peers. Not only is this true on a very day to day practical level in terms of friends taking the same courses and preparing for the same exams and projects, but its having someone across the hall (this happened in 2006) who only using the standard issue dorm room microwave created an experiment to predict the speed of light (she got it to a 3% margin of error). It is having upper-division peers who doing advanced research, just returning from summer internships, part of the leadership of the CU chapter of Engineers Without Borders, belong to teams who provide engineering clubs to elementary and middle schools, etc. There is no substitute for this type of opportunity.
Curriculum
The coursework component of the Honors Experience is designed to enhance your learning opportunities within the classroom. Six types of Honors classes will be offered:
- College-wide Honors classes. These courses will focus on special topics/concerns targeted at the needs and interests of the Honors students. For example, all incoming Honors students must take "Critical Encounters" (EHON 1151) which counts for your Humanities and Social Sciences elective credits. You will also take a one hour class on writing an Honors thesis.
- Honors Co-seminars. These one credit-hour courses are limited to 10-12 students and work in conjunction with a general class. For example, Professor Dougherty is currently teaching a co-seminar for Calc 2/3 students that examines historical/philosophical issues of calculus and introduces students to advanced mathematical software. Chemical and Biological Engineering offers Honors co-seminars in their required Thermodynamics and Materials classes.
- Departmental Honors Core Courses. Departments are developing various Honors sections of required courses.
- Departmental Honors Elective Courses. Departments are developing specific Honors elective courses that are discipline-specific. Electrical and Computer Engineering, for example, offered an Honors course in remote sensing. Computer Science is offering a course on Computational Thinking. Applied Math will be offering a new Honors Calc 4 class this Fall.
- Inter-departmental Honors Elective Courses. Faculty are developing Honors elective courses that cross disciplinary boundaries and integrate various fields of knowledge. For example, Prof. Jana Milford will be teaching a new inter-disciplinary thermodynamics course this Fall organized around the concept of energy.
- Honors Courses in Arts and Sciences. The A & S Honors Program offers a great variety of Honors Courses each semester in a wide variety of disciplines: chemistry, physics, history, German, music, literature, etc. Engineering Honors students are encouraged to take advantage of this excellent opportunity.
Intentionality
Being intentional is required of anyone pursuing excellence. For the Honors Program and its individual members to flourish, there has to be a commitment on a personal and corporate level to be about something. That is, we (faculty and students) must actively pursue both our own and each other's excellence. We are looking for students who have a conscious commitment to maintaining the highest of standards for themselves and the highest of expectations for others. This means looking well beyond the minimum path to get a particular degree and taking ownership and initiative to pursue what you want to get out of your undergraduate university education.