Universidade do Minho. Centro de Investigação em Educação (CIEd)
Abstract
First year Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) students have difficulties in establishing a
clear picture of their future job as industrial engineers. Moreover, these students usually show a lack
of proactivity and entrepreneurship attitude, as well as other transversal competences. To promote
these competences among students, a team of teachers created a challenge for them which
consisted in identifying and contacting two companies and interviewing one of their IEM
professionals. This challenge was named IEM@ProjectNetworking. The main objectives of the
IEM@ProjectNetworking were, amongst others, to bring students closer to their future professional
practice. This paper aims to describe and evaluate the first edition of this challenge that took place
in the first semester of the first year, during the 2012/2013 academic year. The evaluation was
based on student’s perceptions collected from individual reflections about the experience and data
from a workshop held at the end of the semester. The main findings are also presented based on the
more than 100 interviews made by the students in 78 companies visited
