Now that you know about the benefits of including business knowledge into your engineering projects, your next question may be, how do I gain these skills? Often, there are already opportunities all around you. Participating in an engineering club is a great way to start developing leadership skills, especially if there is a competition the club participates in. Competitions provide a framework for developing a club project and can make connections between you and your peers, as well as industry or university partners that sponsor or attend those competitions.
Opportunities to engage in entrepreneurship exists throughout GCU. One example is the Idea Club, where students from all colleges can share business or product ideas and receive mentorship to develop that idea into a business. Many times, students have ideas but aren’t sure how to execute them. By collaborating with students in other colleges, engineers can make connections that further their idea from conception to an actual product. “It’s teaching the engineering students the basics of innovation – how to develop something new,” says Colangelo College of Business entrepreneurship professor Michael Lang, the faculty bridge between the business and engineering colleges.1
At GCU, students are encouraged to interact and network with industry professionals through career fairs, industry panels, internships and more. Additionally, collaboration is key between the Colangelo College of Business and the College of Science, Engineering and Technology students. The colleges encourage business students and engineering students to pair up, use the engineering labs and build your prototypes together.
For example, a GCU mechanical engineering sophomore student is currently creating his own business to meet a need he saw on campus. During his Engineering Innovation and Lab class (ESG 210), which teaches the basics of product development and marketing, this student was encouraged to share his idea with the Idea Club and participate in the GCU Canyon Challenge to raise funds and further develop his idea. While this student still has work to be done to develop his business idea, the support from mentors in the engineering and business college has helped catapult his project from an idea to a burgeoning business.
Most recently, students were able to interact with Boeing through tours of their Mesa location and an industry panel with Boeing representatives sharing their experiences and career path. Through interactions such as these, students spoke with engineers at all management levels, introducing leadership opportunities that can come with experience in the job. Additionally, during the industry panel, Boeing representatives shared that they were a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt because of the opportunities available at their company.
"From the very beginning, we wanted a marriage between business and engineering. We don't want to have a world where entrepreneurs are out there selling things that can't be built or engineers are building things that nobody wants."1 — Tim Kelley, Colangelo College of Business Chair of Entrepreneurship