The University of Rhode Island colleagues each had a problem.
Hermann Viets, then dean of engineering, felt strongly that his students needed international experience to be competitive in a globalizing job market—and, like many engineering majors, they weren’t getting it. His fellow administrator and next-door neighbor, John M. Grandin, associate dean of arts and sciences at the time, saw the writing on the wall with declining numbers in his German language and literature classes: “I wasn’t going to be able to go on teaching 400-level courses on Goethe’s Faust to two, three, four students,” he says.
The idea the pair hatched over the backyard fence more than a quarter-century ago is today a national model. Students in the university’s International Engineering Program, or IEP, spend a semester studying at an overseas university and another six months interning at a company abroad; at the end of five years, they earn two degrees, in engineering and a foreign language. Despite the extra academic demands, nearly a third of Rhode Island’s undergraduate engineering students, about 300 over all, enroll in the IEP. By contrast, fewer than 4 percent of engineering students nationally study abroad, according to the Institute of International Education, a rate far lower than that of their classmates in the humanities, social sciences, and even business.
While other colleges have considered cutting foreign-language programs, Rhode Island’s have grown, due in large part to the IEP. Only the University of Michigan graduates more German majors each year, and Rhode Island is one of just seven institutions with a federally recognized national center for intensive language instruction in Chinese.
There have been other, less-anticipated benefits of the IEP: Women have enrolled in engineering in increasing numbers, says Sigrid Berka, the program’s current director, and the academic quality of Rhode Island’s engineering students has improved. More than half of all IEP students receive the university’s top academic scholarship.
Johnathan DiMuro chose Rhode Island over the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Without the IEP, Mr. DiMuro, who later studied at the University of Cambridge as a Truman Scholar, says he wouldn’t have given the university a second glance. “I was looking for a challenging program,” he says. “I didn’t want to be just a vanilla engineer.”
Doing It Right
From the outset, the International Engineering Program, which was developed by a committee of engineering and foreign-language faculty, was envisioned as a five-year, joint-degree program. The supplemental year gives engineers, whose courses of study are typically rigorous and highly sequential, the time to go abroad, overcoming one of biggest hurdles to participation.
And to be successful studying in a foreign university or working in a company overseas, students needed greater proficiency than they could gain in just a few semesters of a language, says Mr. Grandin, who became the program’s director and led it until his retirement in 2010. “If we were going to do it, we were going to do it right,” he says
Students typically take six semesters of a language before going abroad in what would be their senior year, and many, like Christian Marks, who is now an intern in Qingdao, in northern China, enroll in additional immersion programs during summers or over winter breaks. “Ten hours a day, of nothing but studying Chinese,” he recalls.
With such a substantive language requirement, it made sense to award a degree, Mr. Grandin says. Students say having the second degree on their résumés helps them stand out to potential employers. “It shows you’re willing to go the extra mile,” says Brian Kintz, who is returning to Germany to work as a software engineer after graduation this spring.
The expense of the additional year is lessened by the fact that students’ financial aid extends to the semester they study overseas, and there are an increasing number of scholarships available for IEP students, some sponsored by foreign companies and governments, says Ms. Berka.
The growth of the IEP—some 90 percent of the university’s German majors are engineering students—has led to new, and different, demands on foreign-language faculty, whose ranks have also expanded. Many of the hires were chosen with the program in mind: Lars Erickson, who runs the French IEP (there are now programs in Chinese, French, German, and Spanish), has degrees in chemistry and French; Damon Rarick, of the German program, considered a doctorate in physics.
Both men say they teach with their students’ need for technical vocabulary in mind, although they also agree that it’s impossible to anticipate all the specialized terminology used by different engineering disciplines or particular companies.
At the introductory level, Mr. Rarick says, he focuses on showing how language can be applied. To do that, he turns to something engineering students have a high degree of comfort with—math. After just a couple of weeks, students can learn the letters, numbers, and simple phrases needed to put together chemical equations or word problems. “It’s just numbers and letters, and they forget they’re using German,” Mr. Rarick says.
In more advanced courses, students might read and discuss scientific articles, rather than literature. Mr. Erickson says he’s assigned pieces on computing and the greenhouse effect. Because the technical jargon students might use on the job isn’t necessarily in standard dictionaries, both professors seek to give them strategies to find and learn new vocabulary, and they emphasize the research and speaking skills needed for workplace presentations.
Students also take language courses during their semester at one of seven partner universities overseas. Mr. Marks says the semester at China’s prestigious Zhejiang University helped ease him into his time abroad. Still, he says he struggled to keep up in a probability and statistics course there. “I constantly had my dictionary out, trying to translate as fast as I could,” Mr. Marks says. “I was in way over my head—in Chinese and in math.”
Jimmy Li, who studied at Zhejiang with Mr. Marks, admits that he sometimes falls back on body language or hand gestures to communicate with colleagues at ZF Friedrichshafen AG, a German auto-parts maker outside Shanghai. But Mr. Li, who grew up speaking Cantonese before tackling the very different Mandarin as part of the IEP, says time on the job has given him greater confidence. “You just have to speak up more,” he says.
Payam Fahr, who spent the 2010-11 academic year in Germany, agrees. “I now can talk about things in German that I don’t even know the words for in English.”
Wanting a Challenge
Still, Mr. Fahr, who has just graduated, acknowledges that the program isn’t for everyone. Studying both a language and engineering is highly demanding, and the requirements of the dual degree leave students few options for electives. When students return from abroad for their final year of classes, most of their friends have graduated. “You have to want to do this,” Mr. Fahr says. “You have to want the challenge.”
Mr. Fahr and other students praise the experience as an opportunity to learn not just a language, but about themselves and how to live and work in a different culture. There’s another payoff: Fifty-nine percent of IEP alumni surveyed by the university called it “decisive” or “very important” in helping them land a job, Ms. Berka, the director, says.
If the IEP asks a lot of its students, it also requires a lot of the university. “It’s a high-maintenance program,” Ms. Berka says.
Rhode Island’s relationships with its overseas partners take work to establish and to nurture. As part of the arrangement, the foreign universities typically provide some language and culture courses specifically for IEP students and assist them in getting visas and work permits. To hold down costs, Ms. Berka says, the university has negotiated exchange agreements with its partners that allow students from those institutions to study at Rhode Island, often for graduate degrees. (Started with a U.S. Department of Education grant, the IEP has received financial support from U.S. and other government agencies, industry, and the university.)
Those agreements may have to be modified as curriculum changes. A group of Rhode Island administrators and professors recently returned from the Technical University of Braunschweig, the university’s German partner, where they signed off on adjustments to the curriculum that are the result of the Bologna Process, Europe’s effort to synchronize its university degrees.
Finding internships opportunities can take a lot of effort as well. Mr. Erickson, of the French IEP, says when he first came to the university, in 2001, he felt like a “salesperson giving cold calls” to French companies that were uninterested or unfamiliar with Rhode Island and its engineering program. Now, he has more internship openings than he can fill. Alumni of the program frequently hire current students, too.
It takes faculty buy-in to make such a program successful, says Eric Johnson, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, who runs Valparaiso University’s version of the IEP. “As with anything, you need champions,” he says.
The University of Connecticut’s Eurotech program also sends students to study and work in Germany but has never expanded to countries like China and Japan, despite student requests. Faculty members outside the German department have been unwilling to shoulder so much work, says the program’s director, Friedemann Weidauer
At Rhode Island, there are pockets of resistance from engineering faculty, who worry that studying a language and going abroad detracts from students’ engineering studies, and from foreign-language professors, who fear that the program has turned languages into a service function. But by and large, the university has embraced the International Engineering Program as central to its international ambitions and is considering expanding it to other disciplines, like its business and pharmacy programs.
“These students are among the best of the best,” says Winifred E. Brownell, dean of arts and sciences. “It’s a point of pride.”
