International Engineering Students in Cross-cultural, Interdisciplinary Teams

TLDR: The European Project Semester (EPS) as mentioned in this paper has been a popular program for engineering students to work together in interdisciplinary teams on real-life projects, usually in cooperation with industry.

Abstract: Today it is obvious that most engineers in future will work in an international environment. Further, the development of technology and science is so fast, that it is difficult to teach engineering students all the fundamentals and all the newest results of science at the same time. Things have become more complicated, and as a consequence of this most engineers today work in interdiscipli nary teams. Nobody is able to know and to do everything on his/her own. In Copenhagen University College of Engineering we have taken the consequences of this, and since 1995 we have had a "European Project Semester", EPS, for engineering students who have completed at least four semesters. In the EPS, after some initial courses, students work together in international , interdisciplinary teams on real -life projects, usually in cooperation with industry. Usually it is a great challenge for students to do this project work, because a part of it is to find the most important aspects of the problem and to define a problem statement. Further, they have to make plans for the project work. Most students are used to problems or project work that already has been defined by a professor. We have developed a special assessment system that ensures that no students lean back and let the other team members do the hard work. Further, this system takes care that all group members get individual marks. So far, we have had 469 students from 24 countries and from all fields of engineering in the EPS. It is our experience that students learn very actively, and most of them mature significantly during this semester. Especially the international experience seems to be very motivating. It is a challenge to work in an international team because of the different cultural backgrounds, but students learn to appreciate diversity. We have received very many positive statements from our students and from professors from universities that send students to the EPS. I don't believe that project based learning with teams of students working on interdiscipli nary projects is the only good way to teach students. However, I am sure that it is one of the essential ingredients in a well-balanced curriculum. It is like food: You cannot say that one specific kind of food is good for your health and only eat this. Food, like teaching, should be a well-balanced mixture of many ingredients. 1 BACKGROUND Hopefully, most of the students we are teaching today will still be working as engineers in 40 years from now. In other words, it would be nice to be able to predict future. Many wise people have tried, and most of them have failed (1). However, I dare to predict that society in future will become even more complicated and more international than today. When I studied at high school and at the technical university many years ago, the world and our knowledge was less complicated than today. As a consequence we got a very broad education and learned a lot of different things, that young people don't learn to day. Formerly, many engineers could work on their own, but today the technology is so complicated that most engineers have to work in interdisciplinary teams to meet the demands. Technical skills are not sufficient; engineers need the ability to work in teams, usually together with people of different disciplines. As a consequence, communication skills are very important today. Internationalisation is not a new invention. The German composer G.F. Handel moved to London almost 300 years ago, W.A. Mozart visited several countries more than 200 years ago, and many other cultural personalities operated internationally centuries ago. However, it is evident that today the world is linked closer together than ever before, especially when we are talking about research, education, labour-