New Dual Degree in Engineering, German

When UGA began working in earnest to set the stage to expand its engineering programs in the early 2000s, the goals and ambitions of the expansion were focused on new opportunities for students. Comprehensive engineering in a liberal arts environment is more than a catchphrase - it is a potential gateway to changing the nature of the engineering disciplines themselves: making engineering design solutions more responsive to and reflective of the many social, economic, political and human constraints that are subject to in any case. 

Years later, UGA has its College of Engineering and the collaborative fruits across campus continue to blossom. The newest is the dual degree program in German:

The program consists of a five-year course of study leading to a dual degree in German and one of six engineering fields: mechanical, biological, agricultural, civil, electrical or computer systems.

The program will include a one-year stay abroad in the fourth year, during which students will complete a semester of study at one of Germany's top technical universities, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, followed by a semester-long internship with a German company.

"Graduates of this program will possess not only engineering expertise but also valuable international experience and meaningful intercultural interaction," said Donald Leo, dean of the College of Engineering. "They will be uniquely qualified to succeed in their careers whether in the U.S. or abroad."

An interdisciplinary team of faculty members—Tom Lawrence and David Stooksbury in the College of Engineering and Katie Chapman and Martin Kagel in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences department of Germanic and Slavic studies—developed the new dual program.

"Engineering majors are notoriously underrepresented among students studying abroad, which is one reason why the new program is especially significant," said Kagel, head of the department of Germanic and Slavic studies. "Combining high quality engineering education offered at UGA with the cultural literacy provided by the German major will make for well-educated, highly employable graduates who possess excellent job, foreign language and cultural soft skills."

We're very proud of this new program, recently approved by the university and set to begin in fall 2015. Congratulations to the hard-working faculty who saw the needs, envisioned this program and put the efforts into making it reality. Danke schön.