Education & Outreach

The Mentor Collective program connects first-year and transfer engineering students with a recent UC Davis engineering graduate to help them navigate challenges and recognize the various opportunities the College of Engineering has to offer. These alumni mentors are ready to listen, inspire and guide students when needed.

College of Engineering Dean Jennifer Sinclair Curtis developed a new course, Securing and Succeeding in an Engineering Job, when she realized that there was a need for a holistic, consistent career development course across all of the majors in engineering. This course, ENG 98, is geared toward the development of first-year engineering students, so they can start preparing for a successful engineering career early on in their academic studies. She began teaching the class in spring of 2018 and has continued to lead this course every other quarter.

When Yolo County issued a shelter-in-place order on March 18, the College of Engineering’s graduate student teaching assistants (TAs) and faculty members had less than two weeks to transition their spring classes online. While spring 2020 will be remembered as anything but a normal quarter, innovation in teaching and community among students and TAs have helped keep the college running and make the best of the situation.

Assistant Professor of Teaching Jennifer Mullin steps into a large room of staff, faculty, alumni, students and industry partners, ready to address them before the quarterly “Introduction to Engineering Design” (ENG 3) Showcase.

Each year the Blum Center for Developing Economies, within the Global Learning Hub—Global Affairs, partners with the UC Davis Undergraduate Colleges to select, mentor, and sponsor a cohort of students to conduct fieldwork on poverty alleviation, inequality and international development through the Blum Summer Fellowship in Poverty Alleviation Through Action (PATA) award programs.

Bit Project is a student-run organization at UC Davis that integrates hands-on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) activities into underserved K-12 classrooms in Davis and the surrounding areas. The organization started in April 2019 as an effort to make engineering education accessible to all by bringing resources to students who couldn’t afford to pay for expensive educational kits and programs. Curriculum developers designed classroom projects that use robotics to help transform the traditional lesson plan to a more problem-solving based experience.

The Engineering Student Design Center (ESDC) is a facility within the UC Davis College of Engineering that provides manufacturing education, resources and support for students of every engineering discipline, faculty and staff.

Each quarter, the UC Davis College of Engineering hosts an outstanding researcher to deliver a distinguished lecture that is open to all students, faculty, staff and the public. These lectures are an excellent opportunity for our College to bring academic and industry experts to UC Davis to interact and exchange ideas with faculty and students. This year, we have two prominent individuals slated to discuss a variety of topics for the 2019-20 Distinguished Lecture Series.  

Winter 2020 Distinguished Lecture

The UC Davis College of Engineering’s AvenueE program received an Inspiring Programs in STEM Award from INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine for its success in recruiting and retaining women and underrepresented students in engineering and computer science.