Published In

Sustainability

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-1-2009

Subjects

Engineering -- Education -- United States, Sustainable development, Community development

Abstract

The engineering profession should embrace a new mission statement?to contribute to the building of a more sustainable, stable, and equitable world. Recently, engineering students and professionals in the United States have shown strong interest in directly addressing the needs of developing communities worldwide. That interest has taken the form of short-and medium-term international trips through Engineers Without Borders?USA and similar organizations. There are also several instances where this kind of outreach work has been integrated into engineering education at various US institutions such as the University of Colorado at Boulder. This paper addresses the challenges and opportunities associated with balancing two goals in engineering for humanitarian development projects: (i) effective sustainable community development, and (ii) meaningful education of engineers. Guiding principles necessary to meet those two goals are proposed.

Description

2012 by the authors; licensee Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI Publishing), Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).

DOI

10.3390/su1041087

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/8944

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