The Faculty of Engineering has updated the curriculum for the Industrial Engineering program. As part of this change, various activities are being implemented to familiarize students with the professional world at different stages of their studies. From their first year, students participate in meetings with companies, allowing them to understand the challenges they will face in their professional careers.
This year the Incoming students of the Industrial Engineering program began classes with introductory activities that included a programming Bootcamp and work dynamics focused on professional and university skills. Professor José G. Juarez and María Eugenia Vivaldo, Pedagogical Advisor and Undergraduate Career Admission Coordinator, worked alongside professors Cecilia Lavigne and Nazareth Lopez Gabeiras and Mercedes Augspach, director of the program, in the development of the activities.
The Bootcamp was led by Professor José G. Juarez and its objective was to help students become familiar with fundamental aspects that allow them to think about a problem. computationally. “In our time it is difficult to think about tackling engineering problems and challenges without the use of computing.”Juarez maintains.
To begin introducing concepts to the students, the teacher started with programming exercises on graph paper and solving challenges using the Lightbot application. Later, they worked on projects with Python and the Turtle module, which allows programming and drawing, making learning more visual and engaging. They also covered hardware and software concepts and data types in Python.
The proposed activities help to incorporate concepts such as learning to break down a whole into smaller components, abstracting and separating the secondary to focus on essential aspects, discovering patterns and using them to facilitate the work and, finally, designing the step-by-step process or algorithm to arrive at a solution.
Among the activities proposed in the workshop on professional and university skills, the importance of training in study habits, autonomy in learning, teamwork skills, problem solving, communication, critical thinking, commitment and responsibility.
“Competencies are defined as the social and intellectual skills that each student needs to perform well both in their studies and in their professional life,” reflects Vivaldo, Pedagogical Advisor. She also emphasizes that soft skills have taken on a fundamental role today: in addition to knowledge, knowing how to do things through personal, emotional, and affective attitude is a priority. “It doesn’t matter how much we have studied if we don’t have the ability to communicate that knowledge or solve a problem based on that content.”, Agregó.
Each class was approached gradually. Initially, students were asked to identify and define their learning styles to then assemble study and organization strategiesIt is very important that they know what skills they have or which ones they consider necessary for their career paths to be positive.
Later emphasis was placed on the teamwork since it was one of the skills mentioned as most necessary for university life. Studying with classmates was seen as a superior experience, not only to better incorporate the content, but also to establish bonds that support, encourage and accompany. Within this framework, the students were asked to define roles, functions, agreements, rules and, above all, work planning.
La communication This was another important theme that was integrated into all the activities. The goal is for students to learn how to present their ideas to others, to develop active listening skills, and to overcome their shyness when speaking in public.
The closing of the workshop included a visit from advanced students of the program, who shared their experiences in university life.
As part of the curriculum redesign, the faculty seeks to bring the degree program closer to the business and industrial world. To achieve this goal, they aim to offer students tours of different plants and incorporating company visits into the classes that help to understand the problems of the industry related to the different topics studied in the degree program.
In this frame, The 5th year students received a visit from Martín Panullo, ecommerce manager of IFlow, Logistics services company. The activity was organized within the subject of Supply Chain and addressed topics of last-mile logistics and reverse logistics related to e-commerce.
