<p>Many (most?) college engineering programs use some form of project based curriculum, whether they advertise it or not. After all, what is engineering but working on projects? As a professional engineer, you will typically work in teams with other engineers of different specialties in order to solve problems and make new designs. Being a team player is critical to one’s professional career.</p>
<p>These engineering projects that are part of the course of study will be quite different from community service projects. Community service projects tend to be focused on providing volunteer manual labor while the engineering project is more of an intellectual challenge. Some colleges will also have projects outside the normal course of studies that can be more labor intensive, but these are usually optional and is not what the WPI (or the typical school) project based curriculum is about (from what I saw with my daughter at WPI). </p>
<p>When looking for a job after graduating, the hiring manager can get a good feel about the applicant’s engineering knowledge by looking at their grades (I would go over their transcripts to look at the grades in specific classes) and a few questions in the interview. As a retired engineering manager, I would always be interested in what a college applicant did as internships and project work. I would be most interested in the “plays well with others” aspect that one gets in doing project work. A person who doesn’t play well with others would be of no use to me in our company’s team environment. So , I would be more concerned about a college that didn’t have some kind of project based course of study.</p>