First-Year Engineering

Start with a First-year Engineering Course

Get your first exposure to the engineering profession and its various disciplines.

Develop skills in:

  • problem-solving
  • computation
  • communication

As a first-year engineering student at Michigan Tech you will automatically become part of a learning community of about twenty students. During the fall semester you’ll get to know one another, while taking the same core courses.

You will also enter into a collaborative team with two or three other students in your first-year engineering course. Your group will join forces on small assignments during class, and on large team projects outside of class, functioning much like a professional engineering team. At Michigan Tech you will experience collaborative engineering teamwork right from the start.

A sample of team projects:

  • 3D solid modeling
  • Autonomous robot
  • Alternative power generation
  • Ethics case studies
  • Human-powered vehicle
  • Chemical batch reactions
  • Programming a physical robot
  • Engineering innovations and technology

Use Active Learning

In a lecture-based class, it can take time to get feedback from the professor. That feedback is typically based on graded homework assignments or exams. By then the class had moved on to other topics.

At Michigan Tech, first-year engineering courses are not lecture-based. Instead they are active. Your professor will invest part of class introducing a new topic, and then give you the time to work on activities with your team. As your team grapples with a problem, your professor will go from team to team providing feedback as you need it.

Engineering Explorations

As part of your first-year experience, you will have the opportunity to attend several Engineering Explorations.

Undecided?

Undecided about which area of engineering to pursue? No problem. You'll have a chance to explore them all. Every engineering student at Michigan Tech takes the same core courses, and chooses a major after two or three semesters. You will get exposure to all the engineering fields before choosing a career path.

Learn more about general/undecided engineering in the Department of Engineering Fundamentals, including how to transition to a major.

Two students with faculty at a computer.