Thayer School Joins Hands with White House Initiative

Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth

Last week on March 23rd, Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering formally announced that it had joined a White House initiative to lead a “transformative movement in engineering education.” The initiative calls for its affiliated institutions to commit to expanding their educational programs to prepare undergraduate engineering students to solve “Grand Challenges” for the improvement of domestic and global security, health, and sustainability.

Over the next decade, Dartmouth and other peer institutions a part of the initiative – such as the University of Chicago, Brown University, Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, Rice University, and Georgia Institute of Technology, among almost 120 other colleges and universities – plan to graduate over 20,000 students that are formally recognized as “Grand Challenge Engineers.” The Grand Challenge Engineers are to have expertise in at least one, and exposure to all, of the following key elements of the program:

1) Creative learning experience connected to Grand Challenges
2) Authentic interdisciplinary experiential learning with clients and mentors
3) Entrepreneurship and innovation experience
4) Global and cross-cultural perspective
5) Social consciousness through service learning

In a Thayer press release, Thayer School of Engineering Dean Joseph Helble commented “The Grand Challenges initiative builds on long-standing strengths of engineering at Dartmouth: project-based learning, engineering as part of a liberal arts education—what we sometimes call ‘liberal engineering,’ and an emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurship, for which we are among the national per capita leaders.”

This development is just one in a series of stories exemplifying the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth’s recent ascent in national recognition and popularity.