Entrepreneurship lessons are being added to introductory engineering courses at New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2026, where students will be motivated to learn front-end product research and digital drafting by designing their own products. The adjustment is the second recent change to MET-103, Engineering Graphics and Introduction to CAD, which in 2025 gained additional laboratory time for students to practice using the complex software.
Traditional entrepreneurship is about starting new businesses, “And then there’s this engineering education side, which is more about skill development and mindset,” explained Prateek Shekhar, assistant professor of engineering education. Shekhar led a nearly $500,000 grant through the National Science Foundation’s Hispanic-Serving Institution program to research, implement and study the impact of this component in the mandatory first-year course for mechanical engineering technology majors.
“If you think about the design process, it’s about ideation and prototyping in the latter stages, but the first phase is more in terms of understanding user needs and understanding the problem. So that’s where the entrepreneurship piece comes in, using some of the tools that are available,” Shekhar noted. “Instead of giving students just a random thing to design, what we want them to do is go out there, go into the field, talk to potential customers, identify what they need, feed that into the design, and then the content comes in as front-end design. So first you’re trying to conceptualize the problem using these entrepreneurship tools.” To read the full story.