International Entrepreneurship Education

Entrepreneurship for engineering students must be taught within the global context. Lacking that, graduates will be ill prepared to be internationally competitive. Any engineering graduate who does not scour the earth for new ideas, developments and designs is not competitive. And any engineer who does not look at the total world marketplace for sale of products is limiting potential success. This paper will outline what every entrepreneurially minded student should have in the way of competencies, attitudes, communication strategies, cultural understandings, business mores, multinational corporate logistics, and macroeconomics understandings. It will outline cultural soft skills needed, as well as hard-nosed business skills. Many US universities may be prepared to work effectively with internationally minded students, but engineering students typically do not get involved ñ only 2 to 3 percent of engineering students get a meaningful international exposure prior to graduation. Among other constraints, engineering faculty members are less than aggressive in encouraging them to get such experience. To meet the needs of engineering students, institutional and individual partnerships must be created to promote international collaborations, including design projects, international internships, exposure to successful entrepreneurs from other parts of the world including developing countries, etc

Unlocking the Climate Record Stored within Mars’ Polar Layered Deposits

In the icy beds of its polar layered deposits (PLD), Mars likely possesses a record of its recent climate history, analogous to terrestrial ice sheets that contain records of Earth's past climate. Both northern and southern PLDs store information on the climatic and atmospheric state during the deposition of each layer (WPs: Becerra et al.; Smith et al). Reading the climate record stored in these layers requires detailed measurements of layer composition, thickness, isotope variability, and near-surface atmospheric measurements. We identify four fundamental questions that must be answered in order to interpret this climate record and decipher the recent climatic history of Mars: 1. Fluxes: What are the present and past fluxes of volatiles, dust, and other materials into and out of the polar regions? 2. Forcings: How do orbital/axial forcing and exchange with other reservoirs affect those fluxes? 3. Layer Processes: What chemical and physical processes form and modify layers? 4. Record: What is the timespan, completeness, and temporal resolution of the climate history recorded in the PLD? In a peer reviewed report (1), we detailed a sequence of missions, instruments, and architecture needed to answer these questions. Here, we present the science drivers and a mission concept for a polar lander that would enable a future reading of the past few million years of the Martian climate record. The mission addresses as-yet-unachieved science goals of the current Decadal Survey and of MEPAG for obtaining a record of Mars climate and has parallel goals to the NEXSAG and ICE-SAG reports