Professor Greet Langie

Keynote: Navigating the engineering path: PREFER-tools to support choice

Engineering graduates end up in a wide variety of engineering jobs. That is appealing but makes it difficult to get a grip on the field of engineering at the same time. At the Faculty of Engineering Technology (KU Leuven, Belgium) we developed the PREFER-framework and -tools to support students in developing their professional identity. This not only has positive implications for student learning and study choices but also for employability and job satisfaction. Both potential benefits will be discussed in detail. As such, we hope to attract more students from secondary schools to engineering, especially girls, and also to better support our engineering students in choosing the right job. Driving diversity in engineering not only results in a more prosperous society, it also makes industry smarter.

Bio

Greet Langie is a professor at the Faculty of Engineering Technology, KU Leuven. She's a physicist by training and focuses on Engineering Education Research, more specifically on the issues surrounding the transitions from secondary education to higher education and from higher education to professional life. She was the vice dean of education of the Faculty of Engineering Technology at KU Leuven from 2012 until 2020 and is now the vice chair of education of Campus De Nayer (one of the campuses of KU Leuven). She founded the KU Leuven Engineering and Science Education Center (LESEC) in 2009 and was the chair until 2012. She's active in several international networks: She's the vice-president of SEFI (European Society for Engineering Education),  a member of the SEFI Special Interest Groups 'Physics', 'Capacity building' and 'Engineering Education Research', a consulting expert in the National Talent-Introduction Base for Interdisciplinary Innovation in Engineering Education at Tsinghua University, the co-organizer of the yearly IIDEA-summer course in Tsinghua University, a member of the Advisory Board of BEST (Board of European Students of Technology) and she received the title 'ING.PAED.IGIP h.c.' from IGIP. In 2022 she launched the first SEFI summer school for PhD students in Engineering Education Research. The second edition was in London in May in 2024.