Oakland University didn’t top Matthew Henry’s list when he started hunting for colleges in Michigan to attend. But one visit to the spacious campus, situated on a serene 1,400-acre estate donated by the heiress to the Dodge auto-making fortune, sold him on the school.
Four years after making that decision, the 21-year-old senior is capping an education made possible, in significant part, by a corporate behemoth from another part of the world. German industrial giant Siemens AG provided software, instruction, curriculum, technical support and sophisticated gadgetry to make Mr. Henry and his fellow Industrial and Systems Engineering classmates fluent in some of the most used tools in the profession they aim to pursue.
“Siemens has no doubt played a bigger role than I gave much thought to before starting,” Mr. Henry says. He came to find out that his chosen focus would require learning what is equivalent to a software language. Siemens’ “Tecnomatix” digital manufacturing programs are a fixture in Oakland’s department.
Robert Van Til, director of Oakland’s Industrial and Systems Engineering program, says experiences like Mr. Henry’s are a meaningful template for future students of design, engineering and other sciences. While companies have long provided grants, engaged in joint research, funded scholarships, and offered internships or apprenticeships, an era of close-knit working relationships between companies and undergraduates in classrooms at four-year universities is now getting under way.
Tim Sands, the president of Virginia Tech, says that student experience with real-world corporate problems will become table stakes in the job market in years to come. Students “really need to be embedded within an employer that has real-life problems, and to look at how they solve those problems,” he says.
