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The Freshman Engineering Course Balancing Act

J. Hedrick

Division of Engineering Union College Schenectady, NY 12308

Abstract In an effort to increase student retention, many colleges have instituted a first term freshman engineering course to help students understand what engineering entails, and how to succeed in obtaining an engineering degree. The Union College freshman engineering course has been evolving over the past six years and last year we implemented an innovative format that provided a remarkable result. At the center of this model are: a unifying theme, use a single instructor to teach a section (rather than each instructor teaching a single component of the course to all sections), and faculty working as a team to improve and teach the course. This paper describes the changes we have made implementing this model and to address the issues of course content, exams, student work, and student/faculty assessment used to evaluate our success.

I. Introduction Union College was founded in 1795 as a small liberal arts college, and was the first fine arts college in the US to offer engineering as part of its curriculum. Union College is still a small college with an undergraduate student population of about 2000. Union admits about 120 freshman engineering students each fall. Since Union College is primarily a liberal arts college, it provides students the opportunity to switch their major among the various engineering and the liberal arts programs offered. Within engineering, Union offers degrees in Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Civil Engineering. Many students find all these choices daunting because they enter college not understanding what engineering is and thus enter with their major listed as “engineering undecided.” In order to complete an undergraduate degree in four years, students need to decide on a major during or before their sophomore year.

For the past six years Union has been requiring freshman engineering students to take a first- term freshman engineering course to help students make good decisions about studying engineering, and to increase student retention and success in engineering. Based on student and faculty feedback the course underwent a major revision and was first presented in its current form in the fall of 2000. To continue to improve the freshman engineering course and meet the

Proceedings of the 2002 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2002, American Society for Engineering Education

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Hedrick, J. (2002, June), The Freshman Engineering Course Balancing Act Paper presented at 2002 Annual Conference, Montreal, Canada. 10.18260/1-2--10138