Engineering for Developing Communities at the University of Colorado Boulder: A Ten Year Retrospective

Abstract

The University of Colorado Boulder started its Engineering for Developing Communities Program with a graduate track in environmental engineering in 2004. Over the past ten years, the program has expanded to include undergraduate- and graduate-level certificates and involves approximately twenty percent of the graduate students within the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering. This article describes the history and current status of our program including challenges and successes that have led us to where we are today. We briefly describe our undergraduate and graduate certificate curricula, share course descriptions and evaluation methods and results, highlight student employment outcomes, and reveal lessons learned. This discussion should prove useful to faculty and administrators, from department chairs to chief academic officers, who might be considering adding this type of program at a research-intensive university such as ours.