Engineering Science Undergraduate program, a New Look at the Engineering Education

Graduates of science and engineering have almost similar background in science, mathematics and computation, with this difference that science graduates use their knowledge to explore and increase our understanding of the nature, while engineers apply that knowledge to design products, processes and structures that satisfy the needs of society. Studies show that some students are interested in an education that develops both of these competencies. Many parts of the industry and job market are also looking for the same thing. Unfortunately, none of the traditional engineering programs can completely satisfy this need. One of the noteworthy steps in this respect is introducing a multidisciplinary program of Engineering Science, which connects physics, mathematics and engineering. Today, many leading universities of the world offer the Engineering Science program, and is anticipated to become the core of engineering education in near future. In this paper, after discussing the necessity of a new multidisciplinary engineering program, the status of similar programs in some of the well known universities of the world is presented. The structure and content of a new Engineering Science program, which has been offered in the Faculty of Engineering of Tehran University since 2007, is explained next and the objectives of the program and the outcome expected from its graduates is discussed.