On The Education Of The Automotive Engineer Through Project-Based Approach

Today, perhaps more than in the past, we think that the question for the trinomial “academia-industrystate” is: are the graduate engineers “fit for purpose” and capable of operating in an industry that needs multiand inter-disciplinary skills? In other words, is there a gap between industry needs for multi-skilled engineers and the current supply of graduate engineers? If so, then what should be done for reducing this gap? This being the context, the paper discusses the current stakes for the educational institutions and presents an approach which is currently implemented at University of Pitesti in a Master programme developed with Renault Romania. Thus, our combined effort was to design an academic curriculum “fit for this purpose”, i.e., frequently employing the teamwork in multiand inter-disciplinary project-based learning. A full semester was dedicated to transversal disciplines, which should help students to be up to the industrial task. Another semester (the last one) was entirely dedicated to practical periods or internships held in industry or research labs. Equally, involving as often as possible direct interaction between the students and local and international industry specialists was another goal of our common enterprise. All this will be thoroughly presented and discussed in our paper, the final goal being to exchange information on this topic which we think should be currently regarded as one of paramount importance. It’s our belief that universities are challenged. It is about the challenge to produce useful graduates for industry, featuring short periods to reach the autonomy target. © 2017 Published by Future Academy www.FutureAcademy.org.uk