Two students in a workshop

A Re-engineered Education

The College of Engineering is focused on providing undergraduates with extraordinary opportunities often reserved for graduate students. By utilizing the latest technologies and innovations in coursework and real-world applications, undergraduates are encouraged to develop a unique education that is tailored to their individual strengths and interests, all while taking advantage of programs that prepare students for the future of engineering.

Innovative Freshman Year Courses

As a freshman at the College of Engineering, you begin taking courses right away that introduce you to high-tech innovations driven by engineers in fields such as health care, music technology, biomaterials, clean energy, information technologies, photonics, microchips and more.

As early as the first semester, students choose from a selection of Introduction to Engineering courses that familiarize them with pioneering advances in a variety of fields with unique instruction and hands-on projects – here are just a few examples:

  • Using sophisticated computer-aided design tools to fabricate a prototype of a product and market it to the class to assess its commercial potential.
  • Learning about wireless networking with a special emphasis on security through hands-on labs and a final “hacking” project conducted in the Instructional Cyber Security Laboratory.
  • Examining how biological organisms from insects to pterosaurs fly, parachute and glide and see how they are inspiring engineers to design devices such as micro-air vehicles and flying robots.

Engineers in the Real World

During your sophomore year, BU Engineering alumni from a variety of career paths will speak to your classes about how their engineering degrees have made them who they are today. Some of these alumni are practicing engineers; others will tell you how they leveraged their engineering degrees into careers as diverse as medicine, law, finance and many other fields where they use the skills they learned as undergraduates to improve society.

During class, students consider real-life cases and scenarios encountered by these alumni and think about how they would approach each problem, presenting a unified plan to their peers. Sophomores can then better realize the extraordinary ways that they can apply their engineering foundations to impact all facets of society from a wide range of career paths.

Putting Engineering to Work

Being a Societal Engineer means not only innovating solutions that improve people’s lives, but exciting and leading teams of people who can bring technology into use. So, Boston University exposes engineering students to the business concepts they need to bring innovation to the marketplace. Undergraduates can take courses in BU’s School of Management that focus on the commercial development of technology, and can work with business students to develop plans for commercializing innovation.

BU is a nationally recognized leader in this area, and has won major support from the Kern Family Foundation to instill and enhance engineering students’ entrepreneurial mindset, both at BU and, in collaboration with other engineering schools, across the country. The foundation has singled out several College of Engineering faculty members as KEEN Faculty Fellows for their work in developing innovative ways to stimulate the entrepreneurial mindset among undergraduates:

Technology Innovation Scholars

As part of the College’s ongoing initiative to interest K-12 students in engineering and its impact on the world, a group of Technology Innovation Scholars goes out to elementary, middle and high schools in Greater Boston and in their home communities to show students the excitement of engineering. These undergraduate “Inspiration Ambassadors” show younger students how engineers have the power to improve our lives.

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