During the NAE Workshop on the "Engagement of Engineering Societies in Undergraduate Engineering Education" in January 2017, a number of participants expressed a strong interest in exploring the idea of creating a "Joint-Society" student challenge that encourages and demonstrates multidisciplinary solutions to the NAE Grand Challenges for Engineering.

As a follow on, the NAE hosted a planning workshop on Sept 18, 2017 in Los Angeles on the USC campus. This one-day workshop brought brought together university faculty and administrators, representatives of engineering societies and companies, and students to examine how such a competition would be organized and administered. Six topics were discussed: competition concepts, judging criteria, value propositions, society commitments, implementation, and communications.

It is anticipated that the competition will offer the professional societies a collaborative platform to reinforce their own efforts to impact undergraduate engineering education while engaging students in a 'big-picture" view of the role of engineering in creating solutions for humanity.  

The Proceedings of the Workshop - In Brief, which summarizes the discussion, is available at https://www.nae.edu/178121.aspx. For more information contact Ken Jarboe.