IEM@ProjectNetworking: bringing first year students closer to professional practice

• Autor(a) principal: Alves, Anabela Carvalho
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Outros Autores: Carvalho, Dinis, Mesquita, Diana, Fernandes, Sandra, Lima, Rui M.
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/30288
• topic: Transversal competences; Networking; Professional profile; Industrial engineering and management

First year Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) students have difficulties in establishing a clear picture of their future job as industrial engineers. Moreover, these students usually show a lack of proactivity and entrepreneurship attitude, as well as other transversal competences. To promote these competences among students, a team of teachers created a challenge for them which consisted in identifying and contacting two companies and interviewing one of their IEM professionals. This challenge was named IEM@ProjectNetworking. The main objectives of the IEM@ProjectNetworking were, amongst others, to bring students closer to their future professional practice. This paper aims to describe and evaluate the first edition of this challenge that took place in the first semester of the first year, during the 2012/2013 academic year. The evaluation was based on student’s perceptions collected from individual reflections about the experience and data from a workshop held at the end of the semester. The main findings are also presented based on the more than 100 interviews made by the students in 78 companies visited.