During the bachelor curriculum, collaboration with the entrepreneurs is established as follows:
Company visits
This not only involves attention to production or technical aspects, but also the structure of the company, its market position and human resources policy, quality assurance, training and education, communication and consultation, etc.
Learning experience: 'Day with an engineer'
Students of the first program stage spend a full day with an engineer in a company and carefully observe and record his/her activities. Afterwards, the students meet in a group to exchange information and experiences and thus acquire a broad view of the complex and diverse tasks of the engineer.
Engineering experiences
These are projects in which students, working in teams, complete assignments that call on their Engineering, Enterprising, Educating, Environmenting and Ensembling qualities—in other words, the 5E's. They also learn to bring together and integrate the knowledge and skills they acquired in the other course units.
In the first program stage, the students study the life cycle of a product and analyze the way an appliance or machine works using reverse engineering. In the second program stage, they develop and build a computer-operated device, and in the third program stage they set up their own small business based on a product they’ve developed themselves.
In each of the projects, the assignment is conceived in such a way that they must make an express link to one or more companies. This can range from obtaining information about the company that is introducing a specific product on the market to analyzing the competitive position or the customer profile.
