Hello, fellow CC users. I am a high school junior looking for colleges that promote collaboration across departments/groups of majors.
Example: an engineering student has an idea for a novel product. He wants to make it happen but would normally not have the resources to make it or the business know-how to sell it.
What college has manufacturing labs and resources open to that student to realize his vision? What college promotes and welcomes entrepreneurship and promotes collaboration between engineers, business majors and designers in and out of the classroom?
What college has an I CAN attitude that energizes and enables its students for a lifetime (or leg up) in teamwork like in a real-world business setting?
I want a college where the students believe that they can achieve these goals and the administration promotes or requires such collaboration needed to get a product viable and made.
Do you know a college like that? If not a college, do you know a student organization or program that promotes collaboration like that?
I’m sure there are several others, but Olin is the first to come to mind. You won’t find Business majors there, but collaboration is certainly a core tenet. http://www.olin.edu/
You might want to take a hard look at Lehigh. They are often cited as a school with close cooperation between the College of Engineering and the College of Business. Check out the following programs, for example:
Computer Science and Business (CBE). Takes four years, and qualifies as both an AACSB-accredited business degree and as an ABET-accredited computer science degree. Most Lehigh CS students go this route. In other words, most Lehigh CS students are simultaneously pursuing a business degree.
http://www.lehigh.edu/engineering/academics/undergraduate/majors/compscibus.html
Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE). Takes five years, but qualifies as both an AACSB business degree and as an ABET engineering degree. Alternatively, you can graduate in four years with the business degree, plus most (but not all) of an engineering degree.
http://ibe.lehigh.edu/
Mountaintop Initiative. Lehigh acquired a large corporate R&D facility, adjacent to the campus, after the bankruptcy of Bethlehem Steel, and has repurposed it for student and faculty use.
http://www1.lehigh.edu/mountaintop/experience
Olin, Babson, Wake Forest. Wake Forest has a huge new Wake Downtown biotech center in downtown Winston-Salem that just opened this semester. The idea is to create opportunities for innovation and collaboration in the bio/health sciences.
I don’t have any first-hand experience with it, but we visited it when we visited the school.
I suspect many schools have some kind of facilities like this (or things they try to build up as this). So you should research some to get more info on them, to see which meet your desires. You can search for things like “maker space” or “fab lab” or such.
I’m not sure about whether or not Brown encourages collaboration, but I would imagine with the open curriculum students are readily able to meet students in other concentrations and work with them. Maybe look into that some?
Thanks for the quick replies. I took a campus tour of Georgia Tech recently and I know they have an Inventure Prize, which is like GATech’s version of Shark Tank. I don’t like exactly since it only rewards the top two teams, but I wanted to share in case anyone was interested.
It seems like terms that describe what I’m looking for include interdisciplinary program and incubators. I would still appreciate any and all responses as my college search is far from over.