Developing a Course to Choose an Engineering Major at Colleges with a Pre-Engineering Program Only

Abstract

Colleges having their own various engineering departments can offer courses to help students choose their engineering major with the support of faculty and lab activities from various engineering departments. However, students at colleges with a pre-engineering program only usually cannot have the support from various engineering departments. Therefore, a new course was designed to help them decide whether they should study engineering or help them choose their engineering major. This new course consists of three parts: conducting projects related to various engineering majors, preparing presentations related to various engineering majors, and listening to presentations on the general information of engineering. A survey was conducted to measure the effectiveness of this new course. Results show that this course is very effective for students to understand what engineering is. It also shows that conducting the projects and preparing the presentations are very helpful to gain knowledge of various engineering majors.