Opportunities for students
The UMANE dual degree program offers relevant opportunities to both the EU and US students.
Primarily, all the students involved will benefit the significant opportunity of having a real international experience during their studies. This means that they will interact with different cultural, social, linguistic, and educational environments, and experience different teaching and learning methods, thus improving their entrepreneurial skills. As a consequence, students will be further prepared to work as part of an international workforce, facing the challenges of our modern globalizing economies and cultures.
Focusing on the US part, the involvement in the UMANE dual degree will allow students to achieve specific skills in languages other than English (i.e., Italian and Spanish). As regards to EU students, they will firstly improve their English knowledge, and secondarily they will have the opportunity to learn some basics of a second European language (i.e., Spanish or Italian). Concerning the EU part of the degree, US students will have to attend lectures in English, Italian and Spanish. This is a relevant challenge of the whole program, but the network is strongly convinced that the students will be able to successfully overcome language issues also thanks to the strong language plan that has been prompted (see the section Language courses).
As an additional benefit, the contents of the UMANE dual degree program have been planned to allow students to achieve specific skills and knowledge into several fields of Industrial and Management Engineering, making it much more attractive for students if compared to the conventional degree programs offered by each University partner of the project. For instance, the degree course in Engineering Management of the University of Parma originated as a branch of Mechanical Engineering, meaning that the undergraduate studies are quite technical in nature. Thanks to the involvement of US universities (and in particular, of the NJIT), the UMANE dual degree program allows the student to attend more courses in Operations Management, Quality Management and Supply Chain Management, thus acquiring more complete skills in these thematic fields. To the same extent, the involvement of Rutgers University allows offering additional courses in information systems, artificial intelligence and computer systems, which, at present, lack in the degree course in Engineering Management of Italian and Spanish students. At the same time, the undergraduate (BS) program in Industrial Engineering at the NJIT has a lack in specific skills in some contexts, such as food supply chain and food safety issues, or in practical experiences such as internships or industrial stages. Due to the experience of the University of Parma and thanks to contacts with local industries, the UMANE project will allow delivering US students further insights on these topics. More precisely, the detailed study program of US students has been elaborated to include internships in collaboration with local (Italian) industries operating in food manufacturing, logistics and food supply chain, and supporting the UMANE degree program. Some other companies operating in the context of mechanics, engines and cars manufacturing also gave their support to the UMANE project, for internship programs, thus covering further thematic fields relevant to industrial engineers. As already known at international level, the Emilia-Romagna region is widely recognized as “motor valley” and “food valley”, and Parma is considered the capital of the latter one.
The specific expertise of the partners of the program is as follows:
- NJIT has developed a particular experience in Operations Management and Industrial Engineering;
- In addition to its food processing center, Rutgers University incorporates in-depth knowledge of problem areas including manufacturing and production systems, quality and reliability engineering, systems engineering and information technology;
- the University of Parma, instead, has extensively worked in the context of Food Engineering ( this complements Rutgers’ s food processing center) thanks to collaborations with local industries, and the expertise acquired in this field is proved by the specific Master Program in Mechanical Engineering for the Food Industry. Grounding on these skills, in the joint degree program, courses offered by the University of Parma, although focusing on logistics and supply chain management, will have a clear orientation toward industrial plants, food industry and food manufacturing.
- The University of Extremadura has a long tradition in Industrial Engineering as well as state-of-art cooperation with the University of Parma in delivering joint academic titles. Parma and Extremadura are partners in the Erasmus Programme and their exchange activities have always led to the achievement of relevant results.
The UMANE degree program offers the opportunity to obtain three high quality and accredited degrees (one in the US and two in the EU) in Engineering Management by collecting the excellences available in the involved Countries.
Both EU and US students taking part in this programme will be awarded with the Diploma Supplement by the University of Parma, the coordinating institution of the UMANE consortium. The adopted Diploma Supplement model, fully compliant with national and European regulations, will show all the relevant information (in Italian and English language) about the attended programmes, the course description and its structure, the syllabi, the learning outcomes and the credits awarded. Knowing that the Diploma Supplement is strictly a European document, the US coordinating institution (namely NJIT) will give to all the successful students a regular transcript of records with a full description of the programme and the US credits awarded.