Engineering Education for the Near Future

Frank Barnes, Ph.D

Distinguished Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Colorado at Boulder
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0425
Phone: (303) 492-8225
FAX: (303) 492-2758
E-mail: barnes(at)colorado(dot)edu

ABSTRACT: Graduating engineering students are facing global competition on a new scale. Modern communications makes it possible to hire engineer for many jobs who are located anywhere in the world. Thus our graduates must expect to face competition from bright and highly trained engineers who live in Europe, Russia, India, China, Japan and many other places. Many of these engineers will work for much less, (1/3 or 1/10?) than our graduates will need to work and live in the US. With this in mind what should we be doing to educate our students?

Leadership skills whether they are technical, managerial, or entrepreneurial are one way for our students to be worth more than their competition. In this talk I will suggest some approaches to making leadership a larger part of you undergraduate engineering education program by including working on international design teams, deepening there technical understanding by requiring some teaching for graduation and broadening their understanding of world wide markets .

Bio: Dr. Frank Barnes is a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is recipient of the National Academy of Engineering’s top educational honor the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for his “pioneering an Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program that produces leaders who bridge engineering, social science, and public policy.”

Frank Barnes is a fellow of IEEE. He has served as interim dean, distinguished professor, chair of the electrical and computer engineering department for 17 years, and a founder of electrical engineering departments at other CU campuses. He has been a CU faculty member since 1959 and was named a distinguished professor by the University of Colorado Board of Regents in 1997. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2001. He has recently been working on energy storage and the effects of electric and magnetic fields on biology.