This Spring segment of our 0-credit program provides a comprehensive professional and technical development experience. Students complete alternating soft-skills and technical foundation workshops in the fall, a winter mid-year check-in and leadership retreat, and a spring technical project with a public presentation. Mentorship, advising, and community engagement run throughout the academic year, with an optional summer research continuation.

This is the second in a series of four seminars for students participating in the Dr. Marilyn Berman Engineering Living-Learning Programs: Flexus and Virtus. This seminar is designed to help first-year engineering students strengthen their academic, personal, and professional foundations. Topics include career exploration, professional communication, networking, resume and cover letter development, campus resources, engineering research exposure, and reflective practice. Students build confidence, self-efficacy, and career commitment through individual assignments, group activities, and engagement with the engineering community.

As the final seminar of the Dr. Marilyn Berman Engineering Living-Learning Programs: Flexus and Virtus, this course seeks to encourage students to bridge lessons from previous semesters to analyze social and technical engineering issues. In this course, we will explore how to engineer social change. Doing this requires examining the everyday practices of engineers--including engineering norms, ideologies, design, and technical standards--as well as collective action by engineers. We will survey readings on the history, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy of engineering and technology. We will explore: Engineering Problems (where engineers have intentionally, or unintentionally, created problems) and Engineering Social Change (where engineers have intentionally created equitable social change).

The first QUEST course introduces foundational principles of design and quality, emphasizing their impact on product development and customer satisfaction. Working in multidisciplinary teams, students will explore design thinking, project management techniques, and quality tools, applying these frameworks to real-world product redesigns and innovations.

The QUEST systems thinking course challenges students to analyze how processes interact in larger systems. Students will learn how to use process improvement tools and a systems thinking approach to solve problems and design innovative solutions. By drawing upon their multidisciplinary backgrounds, students will be able to understand and reframe problems from multiple perspectives to uncover new solutions.

The QUEST data analysis course takes a human-centered approach to data analysis and focuses on teaching students how to frame the core problem, choose the right data, and uncover deep insights from data to build an understanding of people and expose opportunities for innovation. Students will use visualization and statistical techniques to explore data, generate insights, and share the human stories behind the data to move people to action.

QUEST students will learn about design, innovation, and quality by studying the operations of Silicon Valley companies. This course will provide students with the opportunity to learn first-hand from a number of these organizations during visits over spring break.

QUEST mentors serve a valuable purpose in the program as they coach new cohorts of students progressing through BMGT/ENED290H. Mentors will learn and practice essential team-building and facilitation skills, including effective communication, conflict management, strengths-based leadership, and lesson planning. They will use these leadership skills to inspire their 290H teams and improve team performance.

The capstone course for the QUEST Honors Program provides students with an opportunity to learn in multidisciplinary teams of business, engineering, and science students in a real-world setting. Companies engage teams of QUEST students with real organizational challenges and dedicate resources to help students address these problems. Student teams must enhance their skills in quality management, process improvement, and systems design and will apply these to add value to a client. In the process, students will improve their teamwork skills.

Students cultivate relationships with new and current corporate partners and prepare project scopes for QUEST courses. As part of the scoping process, students learn about techniques for reaching out to clients, assessing current relationships to determine how to approach an organization, pitching project sponsorship, and determining a project scope. The course includes independent work networking with clients and phone call and video discussions with potential clients.