Making of A Global Engineer

From Chapter Two

Global concentrations and minors, dual degree and simultaneous degree programs, combined Masters and Bachelors degrees, global course work,  team projects, classroom simulation projects, study, work abroad through consortiums or through institution, distance learning, are some of the established models for integration of international education into the engineering curriculum. The duration of the models ranges from a short term study tour for three weeks to in depth global education carefully integrated with engineering studies that is steadily done through 4, 5, or 6 years.  All these models provide global education through various learning mechanisms--classroom study, immersion in a foreign country, working alongside engineers and managers in another country, distance education, classroom simulations. These models reveal that resources for global engineering education are there and it is there for beginning as well as advanced students. It is possible to take a first step in global learning through a Study Tour or enrollment in a classroom simulation project or to embark on a more in-depth long term plan by studying for a Dual degree program which takes five to six years to complete.  Options are many for those pondering the philosophical question of “How to attain a global education” for the type of ventures viewed in Chapter One in academia, government and industry. By integrating global education into the engineering curriculum through any of the models described in this chapter the possibility for attaining global education is there. The educational foundation has already been laid and the process for the “Making of a Global Engineer” through institutions of higher learning has begun.

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From Chapter Four

Cross-Cultural Refraction

There are the famous lines by Rudyard Kipling in the Ballad of East and West: 

                                                            Oh, East is East and

                                                             West is West, and

                                                             Never the twain shall meet. . .

When East and West follow their own path without crossing, as in Kipling’s lines from “The Ballad of East and West,” there can be no cultural refraction. For cross-cultural refraction to occur there has to be a meeting between different cultures. What do I mean by cross-cultural refraction? Harry Levin cites the following definition for “refraction” from the Shorter Oxford Dictionary:

            Refraction. . . is the fact or phenomenon of a ray of light, heat, the sight, etc.  being diverted or deflected from its previous course in passing obliquely out of  one medium into another of different density, or in traversing a medium not of  uniform density (ix-x)

Levin in Refractions rea