Lifelong Project Impact

Two WPI students use hands-on methods with a tech project robotic arm.

 

WPI’s distinctive project-based educational model has been praised by the most recognized and valued resources in the academic world, as well as by those who know the benefits of a WPI education firsthand—WPI students and alumni.

While we’ve never had any doubt about the value of this method of education, we now have powerful empirical evidence of its effectiveness—an extensive study of more than 2,200 WPI alumni, conducted in 2021 and 2012, has confirmed that there are lifelong professional and personal benefits of experiential, hands-on learning through project work. The 2021 study including 40 classes of WPI alumni from 1980 to 2019, asked about skills, mindsets, and experiences WPI alumni might attribute to their projects—and the findings demonstrate significant impacts on their lives and careers.

WPI Receives Three Prestigious Awards Celebrating Project-Based Learning—Lauded as a Model for Other Higher Ed Institutions

WPI students at Iceland Project Center

Student project team working from WPI's Iceland Project Center

NAFSA 2024 Spotlight Award

In recognition of WPI’s commitment to immersive global experiential learning, NAFSA: Association of International Educators selected WPI as a winner of the NAFSA 2024 Senator Paul Simon Spotlight Award for Campus Internationalization. This award celebrates WPI's efforts to maximize student participation in the Global Projects Program—a signature element of WPI’s project-based learning that gives students the opportunity to complete required research projects off-campus at 50+ WPI project centers worldwide. 

students work on a project in the wind harvesting lab

Undergraduate students conducting hands-on research

CUR 2023 Award

WPI is the proud recipient of the esteemed Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) 2023 Award for Undergraduate Research Accomplishments (AURA). A leader in experiential undergraduate education and research excellence, WPI’s holistic and deliberate approach to project-based education integrates research and design experiences into the entire curriculum, building a scaffold of various research projects throughout a student’s journey.

WPI students at the Monteverde Costa Rica Project Center

Student project team working from WPI's Monteverde, Costa Rica Project Center

2023 IIE Andrew Heiskell Award

WPI is honored to receive the 2023 Institute of International Education (IID) Andrew Heiskel Award for innovation in student mobility and expanding access to global projects. The award promotes and honors outstanding initiatives in international higher education by recognizing innovative and successful programs such as WPI’s Global Projects Program—a signature component of WPI’s project-based learning model that facilitates student travel to more than 50 project centers around the world.

WPI Alumni Report Project Work Has Powerful Long-Term Professional and Personal Impacts

 

In the 2021 alumni survey—analysis conducted by Hanover Research—alumni were asked to rate the extent to which their project work contributed to 39 professional skills and abilities, world views, and personal attributes. Respondents from this survey reported significantly greater impact from formal project experience across all 39 areas as compared to alumni surveyed in 2012 regarding the same 39 attributes. The survey also revealed that alumni who completed a project off-campus at one of our domestic or international project centers reported more positive impact than alumni who did not.

Additional key findings from the 2021 survey revealed that:

  • Women alumni reported more positive impact of project work than men in all 39 areas, with the most notable differences in world views and personal impacts.
  • 95% of respondents reported that their project experience prepared them for their current career.
  • In addition to major project requirements, 98% of respondents indicated they had projects in at least some of their courses at WPI.

Of the more than 2,200 alumni across a span of 39 years who responded to the 2021 survey on the impact of their project experiences:

 

In industry, it isn't what you know today, but more importantly what you are able to learn. WPI and its project-based curriculum taught me how to learn and feel comfortable with the unknowns.
  • WPI Alumnus '00
  • Electrical Engineering
Project work is key to prepare students for real life work.
  • WPI Alumnus '85
  • Chemical Engineering
My experience at WPI was one that shaped my career and set the stage for my success in the real world.
  • WPI Alumnus '10
  • Industrial Engineering
The culture of WPI is rooted in projects, and this focus on collaboration and creative problem-solving has had far-reaching effects on my life both personally and professionally after leaving WPI.
  • WPI Alumnus '12
  • Biomedical Engineering

WPI has More than 50 Years Experience with Project-Based Learning—Meet Our Experts

Marja Bakermans
Marja Bakermans
Teaching Professor,
The Global School
Expert Bio

The goal of Professor Bakermans' research program is to promote the conservation of biodiversity by maintaining viable wildlife populations across the landscape. Specifically, her research addresses the influence of anthropogenic disturbances, like forest management, urbanization, and agriculture, on wildlife. She says it's her goal to open students' eyes to the evolving and interconnected world of science by using my research as an example of how to assimilate science and the role of conservation in today's world.

Bakermans possesses a strong commitment to student education, with a goal of stimulating students' critical thinking and problem-solving abilities. Recently, she has been on a journey with students to open classroom content and discussions in an interdisciplinary and inclusive way. In her courses, students are challenged to rethink their role as active knowledge producers beyond the class.

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Kristin Boudreau
Kristin Boudreau
Expert Bio

Professor Boudreau's research in literature, culture, and education is unified by broad concerns for justice, inclusion, and social progress. Her literary scholarship considers the ways literature helps to advance social progress and justice, while her educational research investigates educational environments and works to develop pedagogies and content that open STEM education to broader populations by bringing the humanities and arts to scientific and technical subjects.

Her expertise in project-based learning includes guiding students to bring literary analysis to wider audiences and in new forms: a family narrative of covid in the same neighborhood where the Combahee Women's Collective first theorized intersectionality; a code-based "choose-your-own-adventure" using text from a Toni Morrison novel to demonstrate the extent to which skin color was (and was not) deterministic in early colonial days; a literary analysis of Namibia's first novel to help WPI students understand colonialism and resistance in a country where they do their interdisciplinary projects. She has also advised student projects that led to campus and community improvements, such as a student-run bike-share program at WPI; revisions to New Student Orientation to support introverts; and hands-on, integrative STEAM assignments now used in local middle schools and in WPI's Chemical Engineering curriculum.

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Lindsay Davis
Lindsay Davis
Assistant Professor of Teaching, Humanities & Arts
Expert Bio

Professor Davis is a scholar of 20th century U.S. history, focusing specifically on topics of race, gender, legal history, and critical prison studies.

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Arne Gericke
Arne Gericke
Interim Dean of Undergraduate Studies,
Undergraduate Studies
Expert Bio

Professor Gericke is a biophysical chemist studying lipid mediated protein functions using calorimetric, spectroscopic, and advanced microscopic techniques. An area of particular interest is phosphoinositide mediated signaling.

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Arthur Heinricher
Arthur Heinricher
Expert Bio

Professor Heinricher is the Dean of Undergraduate Studies. As dean, he is responsible for ensuring the quality and effectiveness of all aspects of the undergraduate experience at WPI, providing leadership and working with the faculty to implement new undergraduate curricular and structural changes. He is also a Professor of Mathematics.

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Angela Incollingo Rodriguez
Angela Incollingo Rodriguez
Assistant Professor, Social Science & Policy Studies
Expert Bio

Professor Rodriguez's research program uses a biopsychosocial approach to study health and health behaviors. She conducts research at the intersection of social phenomena (such as weight stigma), biomarkers (such as the stress hormone cortisol), and psychological factors (such as perceived stress and body image). Her work follows two core arcs investigating (1) biopsychosocial predictors and consequences of eating, not eating (i.e. dieting), and obesity; and (2) weight stigma and its consequences for physical and mental health, which she is currently extending into the novel context of pregnancy and postpartum health.

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Geoffrey Pfeifer
Geoffrey Pfeifer
Associate Professor of Teaching,
The Global School
Expert Bio

Professor Pfeifer’s research focus in philosophy is on contemporary continental philosophy, social and political philosophy, global justice, and development ethics. He teaches philosophy courses, international studies courses, and for the Great Problems Seminars—WPI’s distinctive first-year, project-based, interdisciplinary program that explores the many facets of a great global problem.

In addition, in the area of pedagogical research, Pfeifer, in collaboration with his colleague, Elisabeth Stoddard, has developed tools to discuss and address issues of bias and stereotyping on project teams, which are included in this handbook

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Kent Rissmiller
Kent Rissmiller
Associate Dean, Global School,
The Global School
Expert Bio

Professor Rissmiller has served in a number of leadership positions associated with WPI's global studies, including most recently as The Global School dean, ad interim. He also teaches government, law, and public policy, directs the Pre-Law program, and oversees the Law and Technology minor. His own research is in energy policy. His studies have addressed the restructuring of the electric industry, energy conservation in hospitals, and the Green Communities Program in Massachusetts, among others.

As The Global School dean, ad interim, Rissmiller directs WPI’s signature Global Projects Program—a program that uses project-based learning to immerse students in hands-on experiences in a network of over 50 project centers around the world.  He is also director of the Washington Project Center and has advised students at project centers in Washington, London, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, and Zurich.

He has served 6 years on WPI’s Undergraduate Outcomes Assessment Committee.

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William San Martín
William San Martín
Assistant Professor,
The Global School
Expert Bio

Professor San Martin is a historian of science, environmental change, and public policy. His work examines the history of the science-policy interface to inform contemporary debates on environmental governance. I specialize in international development, global environmental policy, climate justice, animal rights, conservation, and sustainable development in Latin America and the Global South.

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Mimi Sheller
Mimi Sheller
Dean of Global School,
The Global School
Expert Bio

Mimi Sheller is the Dean of The Global School at WPI. She is a widely cited expert in the post-colonial context of the Caribbean, with particular expertise on Haiti. Sheller also founded and directed the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, an interdisciplinary field that studies the movement of people, objects, and information, as well as the complex new mobilities (and immobilities) that are afforded by changing technologies and infrastructures. Sheller can also provide insight into the following:

  • Caribbean migration
  • Climate migration
  • Lifestyle mobilities
  • Labor migration and nomadic workers
  • Deportation from the United States

She is the author of seven books, eight co-edited books, and 125 refereed journal articles and book chapters as well as the founding co-editor of the journal Mobilities. since. In addition she has consulted for international agencies, including the World Bank, and for such companies as Michelin, and has given dozens of keynote talks and invited lectures at leading universities in the United States and Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, Australia, and Europe.

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Gillian Smith
Gillian Smith
Associate Professor, Computer Science
Expert Bio

Professor Smith is an award-winning game designer. Her interdisciplinary work merges technical research in AI and HCI with creative practice in textiles and games, with a view towards addressing social issues and broadening participation and perspectives on computing.

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Sarah Stanlick
Sarah Stanlick
Assistant Professor,
The Global School
Expert Bio

Sarah Stanlick, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her research interests include vulnerable populations, health and human rights, global and local citizenship, and technology's impact on empowerment and capacity to build community. It is also of note, she assisted the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power during her time at Harvard.

Professor Stanlick directs WPI’s signature first-year experience program, the Great Problems Seminar. She is also responsible for the delivery and support of global project-based learning through the Global Projects Program, and teaches social science research methods for students of all backgrounds and majors in preparation for the interactive qualifying project (IQP), a 7-week project with external sponsors. Her commitment to transformative and inclusive learning that engages students as active agents includes her regular participation in faculty learning communities at WPI and collaborative work to advance the integration of open educational resources and open pedagogical practices across the WPI curriculum.

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Elisabeth Stoddard
Elisabeth Stoddard
Associate Professor of Teaching,
The Global School
Expert Bio

Professor Stoddard is a human-environment geographer who is interested in the intersection of nature, society, and social justice. She looks at the ways in which farmed animal production can create environmental hazards and injustice for local communities, including water, air, and soil pollution, as well as the spread of disease. She examines how a changing climate and global economy can exacerbate these issues. Stoddard also looks at the ability of social movements to make powerful changes, especially in the age of social media.

In addition, in the area of pedagogical research, Stoddard, in collaboration with her colleague, Geoff Pfeifer, has developed tools to discuss and address issues of bias and stereotyping on project teams, which are included in this handbook. She also has experience in developing and teaching projects in the first-year, projects that integrate STEM and social justice, projects in environmental studies, and community-based projects.  

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Yunus Telliel
Yunus Telliel
Assistant Professor, Humanities & Arts
Expert Bio

Professor Telliel teaches a range of courses on ethics, rhetoric, religion and culture, and science and technology studies. His current research examines the ethical implications of technologist's work as designers and maintainers of socio-technical systems, such as what counts as a "social and ethical issue" from technologists' perspective and in what ways do they engage with questions of social complexity, diversity, and inequality? He is also part of several interdisciplinary initiatives at WPI, including a research project on robots in the future workplace and another one on social design in development engineering.

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Kristin Wobbe
Kristin Wobbe
Director, Center for Project Based Learning,
Center for Project Based Learning
Expert Bio

As director of WPI’s Center for Project-Based Learning (PBL), Dr. Kris Wobbe has worked with peers across higher education, nationally and internationally, to facilitate the advancement of project-based learning, tailored for their students, their curriculum, and their institutions.  She draws upon over 25 years of extensive PBL experience including leading a first-year, interdisciplinary, project-based program and integration of projects into coursework as a professor of biochemistry. 

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WPI's 5-Part PBL Podcast Series on The Academic Minute, WAMC National Production

Episode 1 | June 3, 2024

Maximizing Learning through High-Impact Practices | Kris Wobbe

This podcast examines the unique contribution of five high-impact practices (HIPs) on a range of outcomes confirming that stacking HIPs over time provides unique benefits to students.

Listen below:
Episode 2 | June 4, 2024

Project-Based Learning: More Is Better | Kimberly LeChasseur

This podcast explores the dosage effects of project-based learning—the amount of a particular type of learning experience an individual must have to receive the potential benefits.

Listen below:
Episode 3 | June 5, 2024

The Unexpected (and Expected) Benefits of Projects in the Humanities | Ryan Madan

This podcast examines the impact of a Humanities or Arts capstone project on several outcomes and whether it might amplify learning of technical skills for engineering students.

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Episode 4 | June 6, 2024

Failing Forward with Project-Based Learning | Sarah Stanlick

This podcast examines initial struggles with project-based learning and the impact on subsequent project experiences highlighting the differences between satisfaction and learning.

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Episode 5 | June 7, 2024

Projects Narrow Self-Efficacy Gaps for Women | Lindsay Davis

This podcast examines project-based learning’s effectiveness on self-efficacy with women, suggesting that PBL can be an attractive pedagogy for recruiting and retaining women in STEM.

Listen below:

WPI's Project-Based Curriculum: In the News

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