Responsible Sustainability Challenge

a 15 ECTS project for Master Honours students (or students on a similar track)

The 4TU.Responsible Sustainability Challenge is an initiative of the 4TU.Centres High-Tech Materials, Energy and Ethics & Technology. This course is currently being developed and will start in from September 2022 onwards. More information will follow as soon as it is available.

This project aims to approach the development and implementation of sustainable technology in a multidisciplinary manner, with an emphasis on energy, materials and ethics.
Each group (multidisciplinary, 5-8 students) chooses a topic that is related to developments in technology aiming at increasing sustainability in society; topics in this project relate to the Green Deal of the European Union.
Leadership skills: students formulate their own challenge and look for their own experts.
Academic experts safeguard the quality, scope, and feasibility.
External stakeholders adjust the challenge to the real-life casus, ensuring relevance to the here-and-now, non-academic context.

Course motivation

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

“For students, it’s becoming more and more important to learn and to show that you are able to work in a multidisciplinary team on subjects that transcend your regular education. In addition, the current work environment is asking young professionals for skills that can only be gained through practical work experience. That is why this module is particularly interesting for ambitious and excellent students. There’s a student-driven setup to the entire module with the flexibility to let you work on a project within a real-world setting. In the project, you will have a stakeholder to satisfy and a team to bring together in order to solve the problem, and it is great to practice these skills in a guided and structured way. Finally, working on the topic of sustainability together with a group of enthusiastic peers will certainly be a valuable and rewarding experience!”