New program combines engineering and business to meet industry needs

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The Integrated Business & Engineering Honors Program includes a freshman engineering course that both engineering and business students take together.
The Integrated Business & Engineering Honors Program includes a freshman engineering course that both engineering and business students take together.
The Ohio State University’s engineering and business colleges have partnered to address a common industry request with an uncommon university solution. The result is the new Integrated Business & Engineering (IBE) Honors program, the first of its kind at Ohio State.

The multidisciplinary, four-year program is for first-year honors students majoring in either engineering or business. It aims to give students interested in a career in industry an experiential foundation so they can hit the ground running once they graduate, said Peter Rogers, clinical professor in the Engineering Education Innovation Center and one of two head advisors on the program.

“We’re responding to feedback from industry,” Rogers said. “Learning how to work on open ended problems, learning how to work on multidisciplinary teams, learning good communication skills…Industry would like to see more of this so they don’t have to teach those skills to new employees.”

Graduates of the program will receive a degree in their major, an honors IBE degree and a minor in the opposite field. That is, engineering students will minor in business, and business students in engineering science.

The combined program is one that isn’t commonly found in universities across the nation. It is inspired by a similar program at Lehigh University, which both Fisher College of Business and College of Engineering faculty visited while working together to design the new offering for Ohio State.

The first year’s cohort is composed of 11 business students and 22 engineering students, with a target of 30 to 35 new students each year to follow.

Students follow their normal four-year curriculum and, on top of that, take specific core courses from the other discipline. All students in the program take a freshman engineering course together, modified for the IBE Honors program.

“We took over a section that would have been a Fundamentals of Engineering Honors (FEH) robotics course that consists basically of two elements. One is learning how to do graphics, including sketching and 3D modeling, and the rest of it is to design, build and test a robot,” Rogers said. “We’ve modified it so that the emphasis is on product development, and then integrated within that are the graphical elements they use to design the product.”

Student teams defined their own problems to tackle this semester. Rogers asked the students to come up with three problem statements over winter break, and then picked the one best suited for each team to complete in a semester.

“It is something that is their idea and that they have some passion about solving. And it’s totally an open ended problem with no known solution,” Rogers said.

During their sophomore and junior years IBE students continue to take certain seminars together, before completing a multidisciplinary team capstone project during their fourth year.

Written by Karlie Frank
 

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