In our Semester 2 project, we not only focus on expanding students' content knowledge but also on developing their skills. Through collaboration with various stakeholders, students enhance their critical thinking abilities by working on practical solutions to complex problems.
This semester, our students are working on creating socio-technical scenarios that involve choosing emerging technologies and developing implementation plans at the local, regional, or international level. Additionally, we provide training and tools to improve their collaborative skills. Our unique approach at the higher education level involves setting up a stage for students by providing tools, workshops, and involving experts to work with them.
Visit from Daniel Hayes
During a recent visit to our campus, Daniel Hayes, an expert from the UK company AIM Technologies, was impressed by the level and skills of our first-year students. We asked him to share his perspective from an entrepreneurial and employer's point of view on the new type of engineers that we are educating. These engineers are equipped to tackle complex challenges, work transdisciplinarily, and possess concrete professional skills in project management, communication, and collaboration, which they can confidently apply. Here are his thoughts on the ATLAS project and the students he met:
“It is giving them the environment where they have these projects, where there's a bit of consideration and thought you need to take that through and design it, and then that's a digital aspect or some sort of virtual aspect. And then you have the opportunity to go into how does that become a reality? And that whole project management approach is obviously supported and you have the methodology and you have the build-up and confidence to be able to solve problems. So that's the thing that impresses me is that ability to understand. But if you can solve little challenges, they can become quite substantial benefits to anyone. So I guess the last drop, the nugget, is you don't need to be able to build a mars rocket in order to be a good engineer. You can be a fabulously successful engineer by just solving little tricky problems on the pathway to that build.
So having students being able to get to the right granularity of problem solving and not be overwhelmed by the whole challenges is really interesting. That comes with communication and trying to understand where should they focus their efforts, what is the priority? And at the end of the day, it's just getting stuff done, rather than being overthinking things. And every time it happens, there's involved a bit of building of self-confidence, communication and teamwork so you can go through that process of problem solving."
Communication and collaboration skills
We asked him to share his thoughts about our students communication and collaboration skills:
“That was another thing that I was impressed with, at Twente. So you've got the environment, you've got the opportunity, you've then got the calibre of the students who are able to communicate. It's always a balance between having inner beliefs that your solution could be the solution, but also being open minded and self-critical and taking on board what other people's solutions could be. And then being mature enough to be able to either try fail fast, you know, or let's take that solution as the optimal one for the time being after that collaboration. The collaboration side of things being a self-reflective, confident but not dominating and being open minded. Those are interesting characteristics that I particularly look out to. To summarise this: at the end, it doesn’t matter I if you're a high performer, extremely intelligent, but you're too confident in your capabilities. That’s not necessarily the type of engineer that we want. So having somebody who's still really accomplished but is a great team member and can listen well, reflect back what solutions are, adjust their own thinking based on that, is actually extremely valuable to our type of enterprise."
