The U’s College of Engineering is one of 14 U.S. universities selected by the National Academy of Engineering to launch a Grand Challenge Scholars Program, or GCSP, this fall. The program is designed to prepare undergraduate engineering students to be “world changers” by building a portfolio of activities to create a signature experience. Students completing their portfolio and graduating from the program will be designated ‘Grand Challenge Scholars’ by the National Academy of Engineering.
“By creating a Grand Challenge Scholars Program, the University of Utah’s College of Engineering has joined a cohort of 14 dynamic engineering schools across the nation,” says Jamesina Simpson, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the GCSP program at the U. “Each university will offer its own unique version of a Grand Challenge Scholars Program endorsed by the National Academy of Engineering. Students and faculty participating in this program will gain non-tradition, broad, and challenging experiences to help guide them toward becoming ‘world changers’.”
Components in the GCSP portfolio include:
- Research experience: Project or independent research related to a Grand Challenge.
- Interdisciplinary curriculum: Preparing engineering students to work at the overlap with public policy, business, law, ethics, human behavior, risk as well as medicine and the sciences.
- Entrepreneurship: Preparing students to translate invention to innovation; to develop market ventures that scale to global solutions in the public interest.
- Global dimension: Developing the students’ global perspective necessary to address challenges that are inherently global as well as to lead innovation in a global economy.
- Service learning: Developing and deepening students’ social consciousness and their motivation to bring their technical expertise to bear on societal problems.
Learn more about the U’s GCSP Program
Learn more about the National Academy of Engineering