Director's Note

 

The Thomas Walter Center for Technology Management is going through many exciting and significant changes to provide students with more opportunities to learn and grow in the changing engineering and business world. We believe these modifications will provide greater flexibility and value for Auburn’s engineering and business students.

The cornerstone of the Thomas Walter Center is the Business Engineering Technology (BET) program. The undergraduate minor is designed to give business and engineering students a unique blend of product innovation, business analyses, and product marketing to teach young entrepreneurs the fundamentals of designing new products, protecting intellectual property, building a business plan, creating a marketing strategy, and launching a business. The BET program has around 100 students working on this minor.

The Thomas Walter Center also launched a new Master’s of Engineering Management degree in spring 2018. The program is designed to meet the needs of regional working professionals with specific options in manufacturing, occupational safety and ergonomics, systems engineering, and product innovation.

Another exciting opportunity for Auburn undergraduate students is the project based study abroad program. Currently the Thomas Walter Center runs a program in Schweinfurt, Germany (University of Applied Sciences Würzburg-Schweinfurt). Students work with regional companies in Germany on a team based project related to design or process engineering. In 2019, 30 student from Auburn’s College of Engineering spent six weeks in Schweinfurt with this program. The TWC expanded this program to Pamplona, Spain in summer 2022.

The application process for the BET program will be open until the first week of April, and the Schweinfurt (and possibly Pamplona Spain) study abroad program application will start application around September 15^th and continue until the program is filled (targeted by January).

John