Future engineering graduates may not face major obstacles as they head for the job market, but they do need to be better prepared to lead rewarding careers. This was the message delivered by Claude Laguë, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, upon the announcement of a new $2 million fund for the Faculty. The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Endowment Fund will give future University of Ottawa engineering graduates the tools to understand the needs of companies in Canada and around the world.
From left to right: Claude Laguë, Gilles Patry, Bruce Firestone and
Michaèl J. Kelly.
“Engineering programs leave relatively little room for complementary studies because of the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board’s accreditation requirements for engineering programs. However, the skills and knowledge acquired through complementary studies take on greater importance as engineers advance in their careers toward management positions,” Dr. Laguë said.
The fund, created with an anonymous $1 million gift that was matched by the University of Ottawa, will provide undergraduate prizes and graduate fellowships for students who successfully weave business skills and drive into their engineering and computer science education. The fund will also create the Entrepreneurship Bridges lecture series.
The first two initiatives financed by the fund will help expand the horizons of engineering and computer science students. The undergraduate prize program for innovation and entrepreneurship will encourage students, as part of their final-year projects, to go beyond the technical aspects of their disciplines and integrate elements related to the commercialization and development of products and services. The fellowship program will have the same objectives for graduate students who want to broaden the scope of their research projects.
The third initiative, the lecture series, will put students (along with professors and staff) in contact with entrepreneurs from the technology sector who will share their experiences, both good and bad. These business leaders will show students how to use interdisciplinary skills to advance their careers. The inaugural lecture by Bruce Firestone, the University of Ottawa’s entrepreneur-in-residence, was a joint presentation by the Faculty of Engineering and the School of Management.
“Interdisciplinarity has become essential to the practice of engineering and the sciences,” said Dean Laguë. “All major scientific problems and major engineering projects must take into account a number of factors that go beyond the purely technical, particularly economic, environmental and social factors. We need to prepare our students for this reality.
