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4TU.Responsible Sustainbility Challenge

4TU.Responsible Sustainability Challenge (2022-2025)

Within the 4TU.RSC track, three cohorts of students from Delft and Eindhoven Universities of Technology and the University of Twente worked together on a real-life challenge regarding sustainability. After matching with a case, they worked as a team to investigate and address an issue regarding sustainability at an external organisation. They provided an unbiased, professional, and academic look into the broad issue that the organisation provided and determined the underlying problems to address. They also shaped their own learning path and team contribution through an expert network and micro-courses. The challenge improved their professional capabilities and helped to make a difference both for personal growth as well as within organisations. 

The 4TU.RSC honours programme, which ran from September 2022 to June 2025, is an excellent example of a programme that was both challenging and rewarding. Despite all the obstacles and complexities, the programme will have a lasting impact.

The 4TU.Responsible Sustainability Challenge was an initiative of the 4TU.Centres High-Tech MaterialsEnergy and Ethics & Technology, a 15 ECTS multidisciplinary and inter-university track for talented and motivated Master Honours students.

During the track, students were provided with online guidance and live events, and students worked on real-life challenges from the industry. This was also a Challenge-Based Learning track, students learned the hard skills and also the soft skills.

Topics for the challenges and learning materials were related to Energy, Sustainability, High-Tech Materials, Ethics.

This challenge started as a pilot in November 2022 and has come to an end in June 2025. For extra info, please visit here.

For detailed information per track per year:

Challenges in Track 2023-2024:

Specific information from each university

University of Twente:
Website: UTwente Honours Programme

Eindhoven University of Technology:
Website: Professional development component of the Honors Master Program.
and TU/e Honors Academy

Delft University of TechnologyTU Delft Honours Programme Master

Highlights of the course:

Course Motivation

From a student’s perspective, this module filled a current need for a practically oriented educational programme that highlights multidisciplinary collaboration. In particular, excellent Master (Honours) students wanted to improve their leadership/teamworking skills and gained real-life project-based experience in a structured and guided way. This module allowed students to step outside their own university and study fields and to put theoretical knowledge into practice. The course was built on the challenge-based learning principles and asked students to drive their own education to gain the knowledge and skills that fit with their individual needs. The module focused on the topic of sustainability, which is a topic that unites students from all different backgrounds and which sparked tremendous enthusiasm within the student community. The module also brought together staff, student assistants and experts from the four technical universities to increase further collaboration and knowledge-sharing.

Core Elements

Within the 4TU.RSC track, the focus was on providing students with a structured approach to implement or improve sustainability efforts within organizations. Students worked together with their peers from the other participating universities (Twente, Delft, and Eindhoven) in multidisciplinary groups. The challenge consisted of the following core elements.

Aside from these core elements, we worked with (student-driven) organizations at the three universities to create a broad network to support the different groups and to provide engaging and inspiring sessions throughout the track.