ABSTRACT
Engineering education can trace its origins to two distinctly different roots. The first is the tradesman apprentice education, where boys with indentures to the local trades studied to advance their theoretical and practical knowledge of the tools of their trades. Thus began Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden, with mechanical marine engineering as its early specialisation in support of the merchants of the port of Gothenburg, and Georgia Institute of Technology in the US with mechanical engineering in support of, among other things, the textile industry. The other sort of root is the university or college that took the natural sciences as a starting point and specialized in applications to engineering; Imperial College in London and MIT in the US are examples of this origin. All four institutions are, today, research-led and education-intensive universities of engineering, offering programmes of study across all the traditional engineering disciplines as well as in the crossdisciplinary fields of study that are increasingly important: not only chemical engineering, but also biochemical technology; not only marine engineering but marine technology and logistics. Increasingly there is a move to incorporate humanities subjects into the programmes and students are expected to learn to communicate with others, to become problem-solvers, to become aware of ethical aspects of their professional work, and to prepare for a life of entrepreneurship.
