Understanding Engineers’ Responsibilities: A Prerequisite to Designing Engineering Education: Commentary on “Educating Engineers for the Public Good Through International Internships: Evidence from a Case Study at Universitat Politècnica de València”

The development of the curriculum for engineering education (course requirements as well as extra-curricular activities like study abroad and internships) should be based on a comprehensive understanding of engineers’ responsibilities. The responsibilities that are constitutive of being an engineer include striving to fulfill the standards of excellence set by technical codes; to improve the idealized models that engineers use to predict, for example, the behavior of alternative designs; and to achieve the internal goods such as safety and sustainability as they are reflected in the design codes. Globalization has implications for these responsibilities and, in turn, for engineering education, by, for example, modifying the collection of possible solutions recognized for existing problems. In addition, international internships can play an important role in fostering the requisite moral imagination of engineering students.