Dean's Message
As this newsletter goes out, our Tiny House team’s 238-square-foot solar-powered home on wheels, rEvolve House, has hit the road, headed to California’s first ever Tiny House Competition. For two years, this interdisciplinary undergraduate team has spent countless hours researching tiny house design and sustainable building materials and practices. From walls to water tanks, shingles to shower drains, and trailers to toilets, they’ve researched, purchased, and installed it all. They’ve kept to a budget. They’ve met biweekly with administrators to report progress and defend decisions. They’ve overcome differences of opinion, vendors’ shifting timelines, and the death of a beloved mentor. They’ve bonded. They’ve grown. They’ve learned.
It’s just this type of beyond-the-classroom learning that makes a Santa Clara engineering graduate so valuable in the workplace. For ten years we’ve provided open-ended projects with concrete deliverables—big opportunities for our students to take the reins and demonstrate leadership resulting in tremendous accomplishments.
This issue of Engineering News shares more of the big things being done by our students and faculty, in and out of the classroom. Our alumni also continue to make their mark through their engineering prowess and their desire to be agents of change and good in the world.
Happy reading! And if you’re in the area, please come tour the SCU rEvolve House and the nine other entries at the competition Saturday, October 15 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento.
Godfrey Mungal
Dean
School of Engineering