When criminology major Leigh Brixius first walked into Assistant Dean Adrienne Provost’s Transfer Transitions course, she did not expect her summer to end with 3D-printed rocket parts, engineering lab sessions, or an invitation to present her work to at an international conference of aerospace experts. Yet that is exactly what happened through iVelas, a new interdisciplinary and intercultural bridge program designed to open STEM pathways for community-college transfer students.
iVelas, short for Interdisciplinary Virtual Exchanges with Liberal Arts and Sciences, brings together the University of Florida’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, Santa Fe College, the College of Central Florida and Sao Paulo State University in Brazil. The idea is to give ambitious students early access to research, global collaboration and the kind of real-world problem solving that builds both competence and confidence.
“A big piece of it is experiential learning,” said Matthew J Traum, Ph.D., an instructional professor with the UF Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Traum co-leads iVelas with Provost. “Having a real project that is not just academic, students can both learn from it, but then also produce something that has tangible meaningful value in the outside world.”