Intel hopes to boost RP engineering curriculum

Leading global semiconductor maker Intel is helping the country’s leading universities improve their curriculum for engineering programs to world-class standards and produce quality graduates.

Intel Philippines held a two-day workshop at the ballroom of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Makati City last Thursday and Friday where 25 professors of the University of the Philippines, De La Salle University and the Mapua Institute of Technology, including two from the Vietnam Technology University, were invited to study the world-class curriculum of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in the US.

The institution’s world-renowned engineering professors, Dr. Chen Zhou, Ph.D., and Dr. Spiridon “Spyros” Reveliotis, Ph.D., also presented the curriculum content of Georgia Tech’s industrial engineering program.

Joselito Tulao, Intel Technology Philippines’ higher education manager, said they selected the three schools based on the fact that most of Intel’s engineers were their graduates.

Tulao said they were hoping that the UP, DLSU and Mapua Tech professors would in turn disseminate what they had learned in the workshop to their colleagues in other universities.

“We are planning to make use of the three schools to help proliferate the curriculum to the other universities,” he said.

Tulao said Intel wanted to encourage local universities to improve their engineering programs so they can produce capable engineers.

As a semiconductor firm that hires more than a thousand employees, mostly engineers and information technology (IT) workers, Tulao said Intel is aware of the weaknesses of the engineering graduates being produced by Philippine schools.

And as a company that plans to operate in the Philippines in the years to come, Tulao said Intel wanted to help government and the private education sector address the “curriculum gap” in the engineering programs of local universities.

Through Intel’s higher education program, Tulao said the company had a stake in the problem because they also wanted to ensure a steady supply of skilled engineers.

In a roundtable discussion with the media last Friday, Reveliotis observed that from his interaction with the professors of the three leading universities, there is already an existing sophistication and expertise in the engineering programs.

“The local faculty is already quite sophisticated in what they are doing in their curricula and maybe our experience in Georgia Tech University can help us tie closer the theoretical coverage of their material into practical application,” Reveliotis said.