Educating Leaders

Engineering’s great promise must be realized through leadership. The best leaders are those who not only understand the science of their solutions but also the people, issues, and systems they hope to affect. Leaders must be able to imagine, communicate and collaborate. Stanford Engineering students are encouraged to become such leaders through innovative curricula and interdisciplinary programs.

Business, policy, and technology

The Department of Management Science and Engineering, for example, teaches a rigorous core of engineering methods and techniques in the context of social sciences, business and other disciplines. The result is not only innovative research that applies the power of engineering analysis to social problems, but also graduates who have the skills and knowledge to be tomorrow’s business leaders and policy makers.

Design Thinking

Indeed, engineers often reach outside their discipline to make the greatest impact. That collaborative drive is embodied in the school’s Hasso Plattner Institute for Design. The institute brings together teams of students and faculty from engineering, education, social sciences and business around what Professor David Kelley calls “design thinking.” With the creative energy that comes from concentrating people from diverse backgrounds around a problem, the teams imagine and design prototype products, environments and services such as low-cost water pumps for farmers in developing nations.

Entrepreneurship

In the entrepreneurship classes offered by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, more than 1,000 students can develop the creativity, leadership and business skills that will help them succeed. The program’s 16 core courses are taught by management science and engineering professors along with Silicon Valley venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. In a typical class, teams of students are charged with analyzing and presenting market opportunities for raw technologies. In a more advanced class, students learn the ins and outs of entrepreneurial finance.

Undergraduate research

Mindful as well that engineering naturally extends well beyond the classroom, Stanford Engineering offers each undergraduate student the opportunity and means to spend their summers in faculty research groups, through the Research Experience for Undergraduates. Working side-by-side with a professor, postdocs and PhD students, undergraduates step up to a new level of achievement, helping the team tackle the most advanced problems in engineering.

And to ensure that our students can get their ideas across, we offer a program in technical communications.

Stanford Engineering students are not only exposed to other disciplines and to world-class research, but also to other cultures. Among graduate students, nearly half are from outside the United States and students have abundant opportunities to travel overseas, including gaining internships in China. After all, humanity’s biggest challenges are global challenges.

RELATED TOPICS

• Faculty Search
• Labs & Centers Search