Student Opportunities
Join us! The experience can be life-changing!
The Ethos Center seeks to provide community engaged experiential learning opportunities to engineering students through immersions, breakouts, collaborative research and development projects and course-based real-world design experiences.
These experiences expose students to alternative, non-traditional technologies and processes that are based on fundamental science and engineering principles, but have tangible and sustained impacts on improving community well-being.
The Ethos Center believes that innovation and social change happen best through interdisciplinary collaborations within long-term community partnerships. Our opportunities challenge students to address sociotechnical issues while incorporating social justice, human rights and sustainability mindsets into the engineering process.
You'll go on an Ethos immersion expecting to be changed, but it won't happen in the way that you expect. The best way to describe it, is that it changes your perspective. Solidarity is a good word, but eventually you feel something more significant than that... you feel like a neighbor.
Matthew W., Former Ethos international immersion student to India
- Experience a cultural and sociotechnical immersion in another country for 8 to 10 days.
- Great opportunity for students to apply and grow their engineering mindset and skill set on real-world projects.
- Student projects are varied, but could include implementing water systems, developing and implementing sustainable farming systems, and implementing renewable technologies such as solar cooking, solar PV, micro-hydroelectric systems, solar water heating systems, and biogas digesters.
- Breakouts generally include instruction and hands-on project work driven by local communities, living within the community, immersion into the local culture, relationship building with local communities, and an understanding into what it means to be an engineer and do engineering in other cultures.
- Reflective dialogue before, during and after the experience is an integral component of the learning process.
Current Breakout Opportunities
- Experience a cultural and sociotechnical immersion in another country for 10 to 12 weeks.
- Place-based, culturally immersive, and centered on various technologies for social impact and justice, access to human rights and advancement of design for the common good.
- Student projects are varied and focused on community-identified needs and aspirations which have included implementing water systems, developing and implementing sustainable farming systems, and implementing renewable technologies such as solar cooking, solar PV, micro-hydroelectric systems, solar water heating systems and biogas digesters.
- International immersions generally include engineering design and hands-on project work driven by local communities, living within the community, immersion into the local culture, relationship building with local communities, and an understanding into what it means to be an engineer and do engineering in other cultures.
- Reflective dialogue before, during and after the experience is an integral component of the learning process.
- Sustainability and Business majors are also welcome to apply for this program.
Current Immersion Opportunities
- Immerse in a team of undergraduate and graduate students into long-term faculty-mentored Ethos-centric research and design projects.
- Projects focus on engineering for the common good and enabling collaborative solutions to societal challenges through the development of just and sustainable technologies and systems using novel and appropriate design practices.
- Undergraduate and graduate students provide technical support in teams of 2 to 4 students per project while earning academic credit and marketable research and development skills.
- Undergraduate students register for an Ethos R&D section of EGR-398.
- Graduate students register for a 595 special topics course.
Additional Program Details
- Engage with a local community partner on a real-world sociotechnical design project.
- Students gain a greater understanding of social justice, human rights and sustainability principles as related to engineering practices, and to apply these principles through systems thinking and design thinking frameworks.
- Explore, discuss and apply human rights frameworks in your personal and professional life as a globally responsible engineer.
- Gain skills, knowledge and abilities for careers that incorporate global development, social and corporate responsibility, sustainability, stakeholder engagement, full participation of marginalized communities, cross-cultural work environments and equity-centered design.
Additional Program Details