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When Columbia University engineering students were asked to design a better walker for residents of Harlem’s largest nursing home, they were not just helping elderly folks with hip problems have a better life through design — they were working for grades.
In an unusually aggressive push of the popular “service learning” concept, 500 engineering students will earn academic credit this year participating in projects around Harlem: designing swings for people in wheelchairs, building an environmentally sustainable greenhouse at a local high school and creating a trash can that can be used by the severely disabled, and others.
For the past six years, such service learning has been a graduation requirement for all of Columbia’s engineering majors, in what experts say is one of just a handful of programs nationwide to make mandatory what used to be known as volunteerism.
“We obviously want to create engineers and applied scientists who are technically adept, but also effective in this global society,” said Jack McGourty, the associate dean of Columbia’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “We want to create students who are socially aware.”
At Columbia, other academic departments are now considering integrating service into the curriculum, and community projects have become a key part of the university’s sales pitch to prospective students.
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