Chalmers program in turbulence; a proposed model for higher level undergraduate education in general

The trend in engineering education has been to move in the direction of a more broad based and general education in the final year of study. We believe that it is preferable for the students to specialize. By doing so, the students benefit from an intellectually challenging program in which they develop working skills and study discipline, learn to focus on important issues, and develop critical reasoning skills. It is also important that the students are exposed to real world difficulties, whereby they will learn how to proceed in the common engineering cases where not all the required knowledge is at hand. In our view, if a student gains confidence in his/her ability to become really good at one intellectually demanding area, then that confidence makes him/her far better at rapidly acquiring knowledge from any other area than he/she would have gained from the shallow survey approach where a little is learned about a lot, but not much about anything.