Increasing the Perspectives of Engineering Undergraduates on Societal Issues through an Interdisciplinary Program

To tackle the challenges of the 21st century, future scientists and engineers have to understand the interplay between societal challenges and technical solutions as early as possible in their education. They also have to develop the communication and the teamwork skills required to be effective professionals. To address this issue, the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) introduced a new Global Issues program to all 1800 first year engineering students. In this paper, we present this novel program and reflect on our experience. Our results suggest that student who showed positive attitude towards teamwork, benefited the most from the course and increase their perspectives on societal issues as measured by their moral reasoning after the course.