Engineering practice: Teaching ill-structured problem solving in an internship-like course

Engineering graduates who enter the work environment after finishing their studies are faced with completely different setting compared to the safe academy environment that they are used to. Main differences at the workplace include dealing with uncertainty on a daily basis, solving open-ended and/or ill-structured problems and having to manage teamwork and communication on different educational and professional levels. Students should be faced with these aspects of engineering practice during their studies in order to prepare for work. As conventional engineering curricula often do not provide opportunities for such a practice, we designed the internship-like course with general objective to provide this opportunity for final year students and to define teaching strategies that can support students in the transition from the academy to the workplace. In this paper we describe main issues and challenges of the learning experiences that we found during our action research over four 10 week courses, from 2010/2011 to 2012/2013.