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2017 Zone II Best Paper: When Opportunity Knocks—An Alternative Summer Engineering Internship

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Conference

2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Columbus, Ohio

Publication Date

June 24, 2017

Start Date

June 24, 2017

End Date

June 28, 2017

Conference Session

The 2017 Zone Best Paper Session

Tagged Topic

Council of Sections

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/27433

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Paper Authors

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Abstract

Over the past several years, the Mercer University School of Engineering has hosted students from the Brazil Scientific Mobility Program (BSMP). BSMP students are sponsored by the Brazilian government to study a year abroad at colleges and universities in the areas of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). When advising these BSMP students, it became apparent they had significant challenges obtaining the required summer internships. While these were often good students, companies were somewhat hesitant to hire a student who had no intention of considering them for future fulltime positions. However, in lieu of a summer internship, they could perform research or work on engineering projects in a University setting. Thus was born the Mercer Summer Engineering Experience (MeSEE) program. This paper describes the synthesis of the MeSEE program. A total of 95 students participated in the first ever MeSEE program during the summer of 2015. In the paper, we include challenges, successes and lessons learned from the program.

(2017, June), 2017 Zone II Best Paper: When Opportunity Knocks—An Alternative Summer Engineering Internship Paper presented at 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio. https://peer.asee.org/27433

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