The FIU Global First Year Program combines credit-bearing courses from the first year of a student’s degree with additional support services, instruction tailored to their academic and language level, and cultural experiences, helping ensure their future success. Furthermore, the Global First Year experience provides more than academic, language, and cultural growth. With the included Career Accelerator program, students can also gain valuable professional skills that prepare them for a successful career.

The Career Accelerator is designed specifically for international students:

Four semesters of professional development and career guidance

Skills-based training and opportunities for exclusive internships

Unique workshops, real-world experiences, and cross-cultural group work

Interdisciplinary students are exposed to the fundamentals of science and engineering, while also developing their skills as leaders, systems thinkers, and engineering designers through engineering leadership and business courses as well as a project-based course sequence.

Rather than focusing exclusively on an existing Engineering subfield such as Biomedical, Civil, Environmental, Electrical, Computer, or Mechanical Engineering, this is a unique interdisciplinary program with broad flexibility and a student-guided focus. The core vision of the program’s design is to provide a customizable degree for students, so they may optimize their opportunities to enter the workforce, including emergent entrepreneurial businesses.

The curriculum aims to develop students into engineering leaders who utilize a systems perspective to collaborate across disciplines and design innovative, human-centered solutions to local, national, and global challenges. It combines a core encompassing math, sciences, business, communication, and engineering courses from all disciplines along with a secondary field that could include traditional existing engineering areas or focus on grand challenges such as personalized learning, cybersecurity, and water accessibility.