students that have participated. As part of the 2016 cohort of the Global Perspectives Program, students traveled to Europe during May of 2016 to visit eight different universities in three countries. Through these visits, students were exposed to a wide range of perspectives and insights into higher education. In this paper, we provide an overview of the Global Perspectives Program and its history, describe the prerequisites and presentation, describe the events of the trip for the 2016 cohort, and conclude by sharing participants’ reflections on their experiences. The Global Perspectives Program, with its focus on developing students’ perspectives of higher education, can help prepare students for
large universityin the Midwest with more than 3400 graduate students spread among 13 different engineeringprograms. This sample size, though small, is sufficiently large for quality qualitative work in thisinitial exploration.33 This small sample size was also a reflection of the limited population ofreturners. A potential list of students was initially identified through Graduate School records,sorted by the number of years between the BS or MS degree and when the students started theirPh.D. With those criteria, only 29 domestic engineering students at the University met ourdesired conditions. We emailed these students to invite them to participate in the study andscheduled interview times with those who responded. The demographic data for our
State University’s 2000-2005 Strategic Plan, which reflected an expanded mission with a focus on research. From itsinitial founding, the ECE department had significant collaborations with local industry and inparticular from two major technology corporations that surrounded it. As the program grew andexpanded, the need for a doctoral program was seen as a natural next step in the progress of theuniversity and critical to serving the needs of local industry.Since this would be the first doctoral program in engineering and only the third at the university,several challenges existed. The first was the high cost associated with such a program, thesecond was resistance to the university in moving from a comprehensive institution to a
verification, andengaging with customers. Initially, Zach was excited about generating ideas, and he enjoyedbeing part of the entire product design process. Then the company displaced manufacturing toChina, and Zach had to tackle non-engineering related issues. Zach began to reflect on his workand subsequently determined he should either seek a new position or enroll in graduate school.Zach realized most of his time was spent working with CAD software for tasks that did notrequire an engineering degree. He felt the medical device company’s other divisions(orthopedics) were doing more important work. Zach considered leaving the medical devicecompany when his wife relocated for a medical residency position. At that point, he had twooptions: find a test