Hands-on Experience

Ask students about engineering at Lafayette and they talk about the knowledgeable, caring faculty. Ask faculty about the curriculum and they tell you about the superb facilities and unique learning opportunities. Ask alumni about their Lafayette experience and they testify that their education prepared them well for the real world. The first steps toward that success begin at Lafayette.

The engineering curriculum helps you adjust comfortably to engineering studies. In addition to calculus, chemistry, and a First-Year Seminar, all engineering students begin with Introduction to Engineering. You learn general engineering concepts and work on a design project that is related to a specific theme. First-year students have designed emergency shelters, devices for a subsystem of a space station, machines to help disabled people, sensors to measure water quality, and reverse osmosis desalination pumps to purify drinking water.

In your sophomore year, social sciences, humanities, Engineering Professionalism and Ethics, and coursework in a selected engineering discipline are added. During the junior and senior years, you concentrate on the engineering discipline that you’ve chosen and take selected humanities and social sciences courses. A major capstone design project your senior year ties together all you have learned in your engineering discipline and prepares you to work as a practicing engineer or for graduate study in your field.

Many students do research with professors, an independent study, or a senior honors thesis, presenting their research at national meetings or publishing it in professional journals. Other students find summer jobs or internships that give them valuable engineering experience.

The engineering education that you receive from Lafayette will provide you with the intellectual maturity, self-discipline, and inspiration needed to be a life-long learner, to stir your imagination, and to lead you to find ways to make this a better world through engineering innovation.