ENGINEERING SCHOOL ADOPTS NEW PLAN COMBINING CLASS WORK AND ACTIVE INDUSTRIAL TRAINING FOR THIRD YEAR

The University Engineering School has adopted a new plan of instruction for the Junior year of the Engineering course, whereby students will hereafter be given an opportunity to combine classroom work with six months of active engineering practice and industrial training.

According to the new plan, which will be inaugurated in June and will apply to the instruction in mechanical, electrical, civil, sanitary, and municipal engineering, every student who wishes to take the industrial training work will spend half his time during his junior year working in industrial or engineering plants within easy reach of Cambridge. A schedule has been arranged which will enable these men to secure the full amount of regular classroom instruction and also to spend three separate periods of two months each in the industrial work.

The schedule of work for the Freshman, Sophomore, and Senior years will remain approximately what it is now, so that students in the Engineering School will fully retain during at least three years, and also during part of the Junior year, the advantages of life in the college surroundings which the School now affords.

Associated Industries Encourage Plan.

The plan has received the support and encouragement of the Associated Industries of Massachusetts, comprising some 1400 industrial and engineering concerns, and these industries have indicated their willingness to take on as many students as the Engineering School desires to place. It is expected that the men who go into this work will be paid current wages for the periods in which they work in the plants and that they will be able to earn sufficient money to pay their expenses during these periods, so that the experience, if not actually profitable, will at least not be a financial burden. The new plan will be entirely optional on the part of the student, but the indications are that the great majority of students will welcome the opportunity to undertake it.

Students will be placed in industrial plants, engineering works, and public service companies. They will be engaged in the making of steam and gas engines, of electrical machinery, of textiles, of rubber and leather goods, of paper and paper pulp. They will be employed by railroads, traction companies, and contracting firms, and will work in foundries, machine shops, and electric light and power plants.

How the New Plan Will Work.

Professor Hector J. Hughes, chairman of the Administrative Board of the Engineering School yesterday explained the purpose and development of the new plan as follows:

"One of the first problems which the staff of the new Engineering School set itself to solve was to find an effective way of getting the new School and its students into closer relations with industrial and engineering work before they graduate. The need for such relations has been increasingly evident in the past few years. The object of such co-ordination is manifold: to stimulate interest in the classroom work; to keep the teaching staff well-informed of the needs of industry and how to train engineers to meet them; to give the students some intimate knowledge of the great problems of labor and industry which they must meet after graduation, and thus to anticipate to some extent the period of initiation which all students must go through and better to fit them to begin their careers. Another object of the new plan is to stimulate the interest of the industries themselves in the adaptation to their special needs of education in engineering.

"To sum up, the object of such co-ordination is to give our students the chance to find themselves.

Scheme Originated in Cincinnati.

"The most promising solution of this problem seemed to the staff to lie along the lines of the highly developed and successful plan of industrial co-operation which was initiated by Dean Schneider at the University of Cincinnati and has been carried on there so successfuly for many years. The scheme has been applied in a modified form at the University of Pittsburgh also. This plan has been modified still further to meet the different conditions and needs at Harvard. It is significant that other universities are now moving in the same direction, and within the past few days a large movement has been inaugurated to put such a plan ultimately into effect in most of the large technical schools.

"Mr. H. V. Drufner of the University of Cincinnati has been secured to take active charge of the technical work of putting the new plan into operation."