Chell Roberts
University of San Diego
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The University of San Diego (USD) is a liberal arts university. While there have been engineering programs at USD for many years, we recently created a new school of engineering. Prior to becoming a school, we had three accredited engineering programs. All of the engineering students take a minimum of 147 semester credit hours and receive a dual degree: BS/BA Engineering. The large number of credit hours allows our students to have the breadth of a liberal arts degree while also experience a deep engineering curriculum. We do have some examples of integration of the liberal arts and engineering including a successful living and learning communities in the early years across the university, some rich study abroad experiences that integrate engineering and liberal arts in an international context, and integrated undergraduate research experiences. However, the majority of engineering courses and experiences are not integrated. We have found it challenging to innovate within the existing engineering curricula. This seems to be consistent with the literature on engineering curricular innovation.
To address this, we have been approved to create a new degree from a clean slate. The intention is to create the new degree to model a high degree of integration between liberal arts and engineering. We see this as a skunk works approach to innovation. The intent is that the newly modeled curricula and courses will be adopted by the existing disciplinary degrees overtime.
The focus of my proposed presentation at the conference would be to:
1. Share our perspective of engineering epistemology and how it relates to our approach in engineering and liberal arts integration.
2. Share our existing integration successes.
3. Share our current new degree model and some of the courses that model liberal arts integration in engineering.