ABSTRACT

Twenty-five years after the origination of the WPI Plan, the university continues to expand its global programs, sending nearly two-hundred students to its off campus sites to perform degree required projects. With expansion comes a rethinking of issues of student life, faculty development, and the extraordinary benefits of global experiences for both students and faculty. Latin America is a logical growth area for expansion.

INTRODUCTION

As we approach the 21^st Century, the need for internationalizing engineering curricula and providing students with international experiences becomes increasingly obvious. National economies are ever more interdependent as a result of the growth of multinational corporations and international trade. And competition with the European Community and the development of NAFTA and other regional trade agreements such as Mercosur demand that scientists and engineers be competent to relate to a world that is notable for the figurative shrinking of distances made possible by advances in communication and transportation.

Latin America has always provided opportunities for students to study abroad. The focus of those programs has been the very worthy goals of language development, community service, and cultural appreciation. Nevertheless, such programs in the past have not been developed widely or specifically for budding engineers or scientists. Furthermore, the disciplinary demands of science and engineering have made it difficult for students in those areas to join programs offered by institutions other than their own. When students have participated in study abroad programs, the traditional path has been to Europe, not Latin America, because Europe has been considered to be more similar to the United than Latin America in scientific and technological development.

After general descriptions, this paper, however, will focus on the growth of international study programs in Latin American--a sub set of global programs that are organized and administered by WPI, a small technological university in central Massachusetts. Although partially in response to changes in demography in the U.S. and recent changes toward the democratization of governments in Latin America and the instituting of market-oriented economic reforms (Adams and Thurston, 1997), this interest also grows from other motivations long a part of the culture of the university, which will be explained below.

By the end of the academic year in 1987, only thirty-five WPI students studied outside of the United States compared to more than 150 ten years later. The remarkable increase in the number of WPI students competitively selected for studying abroad has resulted from deliberate efforts on the part of faculty and administrators to meet the challenges of the increasingly international context in which science and engineering will be practiced in the future.

The impetus for such a change began early in the 1960s, long before the current rush to internationalize, in WPI's effort to move away from traditional lectures given in large classes and followed by homework assignments, recitations, and labs. Although it took ten years to develop and shape, what came to be called the WPI Plan eventually emerged. A general description of the Plan follows.

THE CONTEXT OF THE WPI PLAN

In 1970, when the faculty voted to adopt the Plan, it embarked on what was and still remains a radical educational scheme intended to provide an here-to-fore new approach to engineering and science education. Under the Plan, education meant that students would gain broad exposure to the humanities in the arts, literature, and history, for example; solidify their knowledge in their own majors through very close collaboration with faculty; have a substantive interdisciplinary experience that would sensitize them to societal impacts of technology or science; and develop first-hand experience in group dynamics.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE PLAN

On the face of it, such educational goals could be accomplished by a variety of implementation strategies. But the faculty recognized that breaking with old structures would require a rethinking of the total system of education at WPI. Implementing such degree requirements, in the end, resulted in the abandonment of the semester system and the adoption of four, seven-week terms instead, with a fifth term offered in the summer. In each seven-week term, students would earn the credit for three courses, so at the end of a semester period, they would have completed the same academic work as those students in engineering programs at other colleges and universities.

In addition to the change to seven-week terms, students would no longer be constrained by course requirements; each student would be able to design his or--a few years later when women entered WPI--her own curriculum. This flexibility to design one's own major with the advice of faculty became a hallmark of the Plan and is still used today. Students can design majors in music and electrical engineering, or in economics and biotechnology, for example. A departmental competency examination at the end of the senior year determined whether the student had absorbed sufficient information to have earned a BS degree in the chosen major. In the late 1980's, in response to accreditation issues, the competency exam was again replaced in favor of distribution requirements.

The only other graduation requirements designed into to the original WPI Plan were three activities. The first, The Sufficiency was conceived to be an individual capstone research paper or project thematically linking, under the guidance of humanities' faculty, five humanities courses of the student's choosing. The second, the Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP), was a team project intended to bring together issues of science and technology with social implications, It was expected that faculty from all disciplines would stretch their own intellectual capabilities to advise IQPs. The third, the Major Qualifying Project (MQP), was conceived as a project, often performed by teams, in the student's major field of study and advised by faculty in that discipline.

The change to a seven-week term was necessary in order allow students sufficient time to form strong teams that could focus on project work. A by-product was the ability to cut the academic effort of a semester in half, so that the three course project effort could be performed off campus. All IQPs heavily emphasized the social sciences and the experiential aspects of learning and were intended to develop competency in oral presentations and in report writing.

The benefits of going off campus were significant: 1) the interactions between technology and science and aspects of society could be very well learned by studying the governmental impact on the environment at the Environmental Protection Agency or at the Agency for International Development in Washington, for instance; 2) by working full-time on site, students could focus entirely on their projects and experience their work as professionals do; 3) students would be exposed to team work, which, over the years, would grow in importance in education and in the workplace; and 4) a close cooperation would grow between small groups of students and their individual faculty advisors.

The program was unique for engineering and science students. For off-campus sites, the implementers created a preparation that counted as one-third of the academic load in the seven week term prior to the students' going off campus, a requirement that would serve to act as a vehicle for quality control. Once on site, the students would complete the project as the only academic activity for that term, earning a full term's worth of credit, the equivalent of three courses. At these sites, soon called project centers, students would undertake projects sponsored by government, industry, charities, national professional societies, and other organizations.

THE OFF-CAMPUS CENTERS

Having expanded from one off-campus center in Washington, D.C. in 1974, the university now has seven official off-campus project centers--in Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Venice, London, Bangkok, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco--and several experimental ones--in India, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Under consideration are centers in South America, Germany, China, and Africa. Project centers function when the students and WPI faculty are in residence, so they have not required large capital investments in buildings and other fixed elements of infrastructure. Sometimes, some centers rely on the facilities of universities, others are entirely free-standing, using commercially available space for housing and special meetings.

PROJECT CENTER ADMINISTRATION

The management of project centers requires an organizational infrastructure, in addition to housing for faculty and students while away from campus. Such an infrastructure is composed of site director, on-site faculty, liaisons from the sponsoring organizations, and local coordinators, all of whose roles are discussed below.

Site Directors

In addition to their regular academic responsibilities, faculty may apply to become directors of the individual project centers. Sometimes directors serve as on-site faculty. At other times, they work closely with other faculty who are selected to accompany students. Their primary responsibilities are to develop and identify potential sponsors, establish and maintain relationships with organizations who become sponsors, determine and ensure the academic merit of proposed projects, work with the local coordinator regarding logistics and organizational relationships, orient faculty advisors and students, and provide consultation to groups on site.

The Role of the On-Site Faculty

The substantial commitment by the students to the IQP has matured over the years, and it has been matched by the same sort of commitment on the part of many faculty. For example, in addition to having frequent contact with the instructor of the preparation course that the students take prior to leaving for their sites, the faculty who will also accompany them on site as project advisor meets regularly with each team during the preparation. In the process, under the guidance of the course instructor and the faculty advisor, students develop the necessary background for the on-site portion of their work, which they transform into a full research proposal that sponsors review.

The sole job of the faculty once on site is to continue advising the students and to ensure the academic worth of the project. To that end, weekly, faculty, students, and organizational liaisons meet together to discuss the progress of the work, and nearly daily, faculty and individual project groups meet at their residence to continue those discussions.

At experimental sites, if no faculty are in residence with the students, members of the core WPI faculty involved in the global programs visit once or twice during the term. They consult with the students and with any affiliate faculty from local universities to provide additional support to the students. The consultations ensure that the quality of the projects meet WPI standards. Nevertheless, in spite of excellent support for experimental centers, the impetus is to determine if the center should become permanent, in which case, WPI faculty would accompany the students.

The Role of Organizational Liaisons

Whether or not WPI faculty are in residence with the students or are visiting does not diminish in any way the importance of local consultants to the projects. Each organization supplies a technical person who interacts daily with the students and weekly with the faculty. Liaisons provide technical support and advice as well as interpret the organizational culture for the students and faculty. Rather than confuse the students who are receiving academic and a modicum of technical advice from on-site faculty, liaisons provide the clarity students need to fulfill their obligation to the sponsor.

The Local Coordinators

At the majority of off-campus centers, a local person provides non-technical, logistical support to the WPI center director. The role varies with the needs of individual centers. However, at most sites, except in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, without the local coordinator, the development of projects would be daunting. At Latin American sites, the personal networks are especially important, not only because coordinators can provide a wide variety of contacts, but because the introductions informally signal a measure of approval by the local person for WPI. It is this personal recommendation that tends to be important because it often results in the first appointment with a prospective sponsor.

At other sites, it is often possible to gain an introductory interview with prospective sponsors from a call made by the site director without personal recommendations or previous introduction. This is rarely possible in Latin America. Moreover, the heads of organizations often belong to the same social clubs, have attended the same private schools as children, or are related to each other and to the local coordinators. So doors open more quickly than they would without personal connections. Another crucial element is that, in many cases, the local coordinator provides assistance with the local language when faculty are not able to manage translations for themselves and students.

THE LATIN AMERICAN CENTERS

As part of the expansion of its international programs in the late 1980s, WPI began to look towards Latin America. The fact that WPI offers a Sufficiency in Spanish language provided a rationale for looking southward. But the expansion in that direction was also part of the development on campus of a more balanced multi-cultural student body and global perspective. Developing a Latino site demanded that the university view such an expansion as central to its core business: namely, that of developing globally aware students, whose perspective toward multiculturalism expressed a world view appropriate for the 21^st century This global view, now very much in vogue (Gaudiani, 1997; Yee, 1995) was anticipated ten years ago by the university as being crucial to the success of graduates in technological and scientific fields in the next century. So was the goal--now so popular (Johnson, Johnson & Smith, 1995)--to stimulate students' ability to work cooperatively.

The university recognized that Latin America had much to offer our students because their professional lives, more than likely, eventually would include significant contact with countries south of Texas.

The Center in Puerto Rico

In 1990, the XEROX Foundation awarded a multi-year grant to WPI for the development of an off-campus project center in Puerto Rico. The grant proposal identified several goals:

1. to familiarize students from the mainland and other countries with the Puerto Rican culture in an effort to promote intercultural understanding,
2. to provide an academic experience for WPI students of Puerto Rican extraction who may have grown up on the mainland and who might wish to revisit their original culture,
3. and to prepare all participating students for a multicultural workforce.

Puerto Rico seemed ideal as a first site in Latin America. The island has the advantage of offering Spanish language development opportunities to those students who may have completed or are completing their Sufficiency in Spanish. Also, students who do not have Spanish language skills could may benefit from an intercultural experience there. The program has its share, too, of students who are testing their capacity for adventure and who want to go away but who want some protection from large cultural adjustments.

Because of Section 936 of the Internal Revenue Code, mainland companies operating in Puerto Rico for many years have enjoyed significant tax benefits (Economic Development Administration, 1988), which have enticed many of them to set up manufacturing plants on the island. The presence of so many familiar U.S. firms in Puerto Rico increases the potential for students to view Puerto Rico as an exotic extension of mainland commerce and, thus, a desirable site for projects. Moreover, Puerto Rico offers a variety of environmental projects, which are always popular with WPI students.

In the vast majority of cases, the organization liaison is fully bilingual--in some cases having lived for at least several years on the mainland or having attended university there. Other liaisons have worked in their company's mainland facilities and have been transferred to or back to the island. Organizations having general headquarters on the mainland, rather than insulate students against cultural adaptation, re-emphasize to students the necessity and challenge in balancing the local view with the national view.

Yet, in spite of close ties to the mainland, the ambiance of Puerto Rico is distinctly Latino, as evidenced by the predominating language, food, music, holiday observances, and historical attachment to Hispanic culture. Cultural adaptation is required in the workplace and is encouraged during the students' leisure time. Therefore, students become well versed in what it takes to become familiar with and comfortable in another culture, making them suitable for employment by multinational corporations or smaller organizations that deal interculturally.

A major benefit of contact with Puerto Rico over a two month on-site period is the impact on stereotypes sometimes held by non-Hispanics about Puerto Ricans. As stated earlier, an explicit goal of the XEROX grant was to develop intercultural understanding. By being forced to examine their own assumptions about Puerto Ricans and by enjoying frequent social occasions in addition to business relations with colleagues and acquaintances from work, students return with positive feelings about Latino cultures in general and Puerto Ricans, in particular. Mainland Puerto Rican students enjoy the reestablishment of family and cultural ties, and local Puerto Rican students studying at WPI take pride in showing their peers their environment, family, and friends. It is a positive and instructive experience for non-minority students to experience what on the mainland is a minority culture as the prevailing one.

By the end of the academic year 1991-92, the first group of nine students and one faculty advisor were on site. Students, working in teams usually of three students, completed projects in organizations such the Department of Transportation and Public Works, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, and The Design Center at Fomento, an economic development organization. The following year, the center expanded to include three person projects in other governmental organizations and industry. In the academic year 1996-1997, twenty-four students completed eight projects under guidance of two faculty, and the projects again were completed in government and industry as well as in the charitable sector. In addition to the ones mentioned above, organizations such as GE, AT&T, the Environmental Quality Board, the Institute of Tropical Forestry, US Geological Survey, the Down's Syndrome Foundation, American Red Cross now participate.

The Costa Rican Center

In the summer of 1992, two professors studying in intensive Spanish courses and the students whom they would guide through several group IQPs comprised a small experimental program in Costa Rica. The programs was intended to test the feasibility of the university's establishing and maintaining a project center in Costa Rica.

The following summer, the same professors returned with several other groups of students who completed IQPs. The faculty determined that Costa Rica had much to offer as an official project center. Nevertheless, several crucial things became apparent during those two years:

1) The center attracted international students, particularly Latinos, in a way the center in Puerto Rico did not. Why was this? An obvious reason might be that the culture in Costa Rica was similar to that in their own home countries; therefore, they might have thought an experience there would be very comfortable. But this explanation failed to take into account the fact that the culture of one Latin American country varies greatly from that of others and that Latino applicants have already mastered the transition to the U.S., reducing the psychological need to seek familiarity. Moreover, there were other Latinos who were choosing European sites in order to experience what they perceived to be real differences. No doubt, some chose Costa Rica for the same reasons that non-Latinos chose that center. A partial explanation for the frequent selection of Costa Rica by Latino students may be found in the prevalence of low salaries in Latin America and an expectation that some portion of one's career will be spent in entrepreneurial activities. For many Latin American students these facts result in their wanting to experience the working world in a Latino culture so that, upon graduation, they can present themselves to prospective employers as already somewhat experienced. Moreover, they develop ideas of markets that they can explore later in their own enterprise or in an already established family business.

2) Costa Rica offered relatively inexpensive intensive Spanish language programs that the university could make obligatory as part of their Costa Rican stay for students whose first language was not Spanish. Also, those faculty who eventually might participate in either the Puerto Rican or Costa Rican programs could be given the opportunity to spend time in those intensive Spanish courses before participating as advisors.

3) Because there was no certainty that organization liaisons would speak English, in addition to the need to mix students of different academic specialties, there was a need to mix students in project groups to include at least one person with strong Spanish language skills. Moreover, liaisons did not necessarily have knowledge of American culture except through vehicles such as cable television and books. This was the case even with liaisons who had attended American or English speaking schools. Therefore, to have a Latino student on a team would be advantageous.

4) It was impossible to anticipate, using our usual informal assessment techniques, to know which students would adapt easily and which ones would have difficulty. Thus, the mixing of teams to include one person whose first language is Spanish seemed logical to help those with little or no Spanish.

5) without a local coordinator, the center would fail; a local person's networks were essential for making initial contacts beyond the serendipitous ones made by the professors during the first two summers and to ensure that the sponsoring organizations would respond to administrative needs of the center's director in a timely fashion. One cultural difference that spills over from the Latin American sites to the campus is a difference in urgency about the set-up time needed each year to prepare for the next set of projects.

The Costa Rican center soon will receive its fifth set of students, a small cadre of professors are taking advantage of the opportunity to develop Spanish language skills in anticipation of participating as advisors in Costa Rica and Puerto Rico, and participating organizations now include those who are repeating their sponsorship. Projects come from both the private and public sectors and span topic a variety of areas in international marketing; quality control; the development of internet capabilities; and environmental assessments, including those in primary forests. Both small and large organizations are involved.

Faculty Development in Latin American Centers

The issues of faculty development are not unique to the Latin American centers but it is clear that faculty need to be oriented to differences in culture as much as do students. Encouraging them to learn the local language is not sufficient, and one cannot assume that faculty are immune from their own sense of cultural disjointedness when they are in charge of a group of students. Without the overlay of stateside culture to cushion the impact of differences in culture in Puerto Rico or without the experience with Latin America that the first two professors in Costa Rica had, project advisors might not realize their own so called "culture shock." To be able to advise students properly and to be able to interact with local people requires a knowledge of local issues and the politics and economics of the host country as well as an awareness of one's own cultural baggage.

Challenges Faced by the Project Centers

Project centers are a continuously ripe source for challenges. Some challenges discussed below are common to all of the global centers, but some apply specifically to Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, and any others that may be developed in Latin America.

Faculty now apply to advise projects in large numbers. Some find specific sites especially appealing because of the weekend opportunities for travel. Others wish to develop their own research opportunities while on site. Still others hope to enjoy the special relationship with students that invariably develops when faculty and students are together in such an intense academic experience.

However, off-campus advising is very different from the advising that takes place on campus. While advisors are not required to function as house parents, they are the designated contacts for students who have problems, which may run the gamut from minor medical concerns to major emotional deterioration and even suicide gestures. These and other human problems, are guaranteed to travel to remote sites with the students. At times, the problems require immediate action.

Sometimes other problems also require immediate action, such as the breakdown of WPI supplied computers and other equipment used by the students and faculty. There, also, may be ethical concerns associated with projects that do not appear until the students are on site. To send faculty who are unwilling or temperamentally unable to handle such situations would be potentially disastrous.

Less obvious is the problem of the choice of faculty who are very able advisors but are not very interested in having a close relationship with students. One of the characteristics of the early years of the global programs was the very satisfying relationship that individual faculty developed with their project groups when they are away together. Developing such a relationship was built into the expectations for faculty at off-campus centers. As more sites are developed and as more students participate, it will be difficult always to find faculty who wish to have such intensity with students. Some aspects of the program may change as a result.

A new faculty position at the university recently was created to provide leadership in the areas of faculty development and student and faculty recruitment. In the past, there was a relatively stable group of faculty who participated as advisors at off-campus sites, but, as a result of the growth of the programs in general and of the issues noted above, there is now a need to commit resources to the development and training of other faculty to go off-campus to advise.

The Latin American sites hold potential for faculty to develop relationships with faculty from local universities. The inaccurate assumption that state of the art research does not take place in Latin American will have to be overcome. This problem is being tackled at the present time through growing relationships between the Mechanical Engineering Department at WPI and several departments at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez. Efforts are being made to develop other relationships between departments at WPI and the University of Costa Rica.

On the surface, it would seem that when faculty advise projects in a variety of organizations at the same time, lack of disciplinary expertise for each project would be a severe disadvantage. But, as noted earlier, the organizational liaisons supply much of that expertise. In Puerto Rico and Costa Rica, as in other centers, it would be unreasonable to expect each advisor to be an expert in marketing, eco-tourism, quality control, web page development, and erosion control all at the same time, for example. Happily, it is true that participating faculty tend to become expert in guiding students to the proper sources for information and, in the process or doing so, reading the students' very substantial literature review, and being exposed to the students' work on a daily basis, they become acquainted with these topics. The next time they advise off-campus, as is customary for most, they have basic technical skills in these subjects.

The tremendous pace of work in the United States is not always matched in other countries, nor is that pace necessarily seen by Latinos as a positive aspect of our culture. Therefore, in the Latin American centers, as mentioned earlier, the pace of responses by prospective sponsors, requires that the centers' directors set aside cultural expectations and proceed under a different set of expectations. All center directors must be prepared for cultural adaptation even if it is at a long distance.

Moreover, in the case of the Latin American centers, the director must continue to strive to become bilingual because correspondence and phone calls often must be conducted in Spanish. Language differences will continue to be a problem for faculty, too, even though some of them also are studying Spanish. Language acquisition is a long process that requires continual practice. Therefore, WPI will have to remain vigorously supportive of faculty efforts to master Spanish.

What Does the Future Hold in General and for the Latin American Programs?

Plans are being made to assess the feasibility and the need to establish a new center in Argentina. If a new Latin American center were to open, there would be an additional need for more well-prepared students and faculty. As a result, linking the completion of a Spanish Sufficiency to participation in one of the Latin American center makes sense. Such preferential acceptance to one of the Latin American centers is being instituted starting in the academic year 1997-1998.

Under consideration is the idea of making an off-campus experience available to all WPI students, although the issue of financial implications have not been fully considered. A variety of options are being discussed in the belief that international experiences significantly enhance education. Latin American sites would prosper under this arrangement because of increased demand.

Already, there are small music and theater technology Sufficiency programs in London, but technical projects may be the next ones targeted for internationalization. WPI already has experiments in providing MQP opportunities off campus. The electrical engineering program has a relationship with organizations in Ireland, who sponsor MQPs and provide technical advisors. Additionally, in the fall of 1997, there will be several MQP groups at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

There are, however, problems associated with off campus MQPs that do not exist for IQPs: namely, there have to be faculty available to advise these projects or faculty from exchange universities who are willing to advise them. In Puerto Rico, WPI graduates, who are professors at the University of Puerto Rico, have volunteered for that role and have hosted two MQPs experimentally. It is conceivable that such cooperation could exist in universities in Costa Rica and elsewhere. Other models may exist, too, including sending several MQP project groups off site with WPI faculty. In that case, faculty would have to be able to leave their own laboratories for a seven week term. But such an action might open the opportunity for WPI faculty to develop research relationships as well as exchange relationships with Latin American faculty.

The commitment of WPI to its global programs will result in their growth and in the development of new forms over the next ten years For students and faculty who have participated in the past, the pleasure and the personal growth will last a lifetime. For those who will participate in the future, the same is guaranteed.

REFERENCES

Adams, C. and Thurston, C. March 1997. Latin America 2002. Latin Trade. Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 41-56.

Economic Development Administration. 1988. CBI/936 Guidelines. San Juan

Gaudiani, C. December 1996. Embarking on an Age of exploration. WPI Journal. Vol. XCIX, No. 4. pp. 4-5.

Johnson, D., Johnson, R. & Smith, K. 1991. Active Learning: Cooperation in the Classroom. Edina, MN:Interaction Book Company.

Yee, K. Tim. Fall 1995. International education: We don't have a choice. International Education Forum. Vol. 15. No. 2. pp. 135-137.

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