Preparatory course provides knowledge and skills not acquired in school

Author: Beate Diederichs

On the engineering preparatory course, future students explore applied mathematics, learning methods, and selected areas of physics, chemistry, and computer science. The team of lecturers led by organizer Daniel Knöfel aims to prepare participants for studying at university and to prevent problems that often occur, especially with first-year students. There is a charge for the course, but it is worth it, as evaluations and personal feedback show.

© Crispin-Iven Mokry

Daniel Knöfel, project manager, organizer, and math lecturer on the engineering preparatory course, is a numbers person – so he knows exactly what the annual evaluation forms reveal: Almost 100 percent of participants would recommend the course to others. “But it is the spontaneous feedback – when someone writes to tell us that what we taught them has helped them a lot – that is much more valuable to us,” he says. Often, the preparatory course has been the first step on the path to a successful career in engineering and science. The handy tools taught on the course continue to benefit participants, even when they have moved into teaching or research themselves.

Preparatory courses are open to anyone interested in return for the course fee. They were, however, set up about ten years ago as the “brainchild of the electrical engineering department” and part of the department’s Geführter Studienbeginn measures to support new students. “We reverted to the seminar group principle with a research associate as a mentor to help first-year students get started. At the same time, we found that we were getting prospective students with an increasingly disparate range of prior knowledge and they needed targeted preparation for university study,” recalls Daniel Knöfel. The Dean of Studies for Electrical Engineering, Professor Gerald Gerlach, and the academic advisor at the time, Dr. Hellmut Leuterer, developed the idea and course concept and recruited a small team of lecturers. Today, there are six people on the team. They include teachers and retired professionals as well as TUD staff. Almost all of them work on a freelance basis. Only the organizer, Daniel Knöfel, who studied business informatics at TUD, holds a permanent position at the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The courses are run through TUDIAS and are financed by course fees. Since 2013, the course has been modular: Prospective students book individual components and pay for them as a package.

Although the course can be taken as a distance learning program, the vast majority of participants choose the face-to-face option. “Many start with the main, compulsory component, which covers math, study skills, and practical workshops, and then follow up with the physics module, for which there are only limited places,” Daniel Knöfel tells us. He recommends that prospective students who graduated from high school some time ago or who want to switch from practice to university should take the foundation module first. According to the organizer, depending on what you want to study and which subjects you dropped at school, you should sign up for computer science, chemistry, or electrical engineering as well as physics. “We are often asked why prospective students need our course despite having a good grade average from high school. The answer is that they need knowledge and skills for university that they will not have acquired at school. For example, we teach them how to find methodical mathematical solutions without a calculator, and look at content that is either part of the elective curriculum in high schools or is no longer taught, but which they need to master for their degree, such as partial integration, complex numbers and certain areas of calculus,” explains Daniel Knöfel. The modules gradually teach future students independent learning: The basic content is covered in a lecture; participants then apply and review what they have been taught in revision courses, and learn how to develop solutions. They then practice and explore content further under the guidance of tutors. Finally, they work through content on their own in the “study room” (Lernraum) or at home through a learning platform. If a problem arises, they can check with their tutor. As of 2018, there has also been a special revision class for students looking for targeted revision support before their first set of exams.

In addition to subject-specific preparation, course participants can also meet practitioners and find out about exciting job options in the practical workshop “Rookie meets Engineer” (Rookie trifft Ingenieur). This is a chance to learn what skills are expected and how to develop them. There’s another new workshop in 2018: “A chip learns to see” (Ein Chip lernt sehen) vividly illustrates the links between math, electrical engineering, and computer science. “I could see us combining and expanding all these courses in future in an orientation semester,” says Daniel Knöfel. The demand is there: Around one hundred new students took the preparatory course in 2017. Katharina Schulz, now a staff member at TUD’s Institute of Circuits and Systems, experienced the preparatory course when it was still called the “Electrical Engineering Summer Course”. “I had done vocational training after graduating from high school, and a number of years later I decided to study electrical engineering because I had always been fascinated by technical processes. But I knew that the gap between high school and uni would not make things easy. I attended the introductory lecture for the summer course, was immediately impressed and enrolled. Looking back, I am very grateful that it was available. It prepared me for the first few semesters and introduced me to people who were as serious about studying as I was. In short, it opened the door to electrical engineering for me.” Christoph Scale, who attended the course in the lead up to the 2017/18 winter semester, tells us that he doesn’t have a high school diploma – “I came straight from work to university, so I lacked a lot of the prior knowledge that I knew I would need. The course made it incredibly easy for me to get started, especially in math, because we addressed most of the key areas for the first few semesters.”

All that positive feedback is reflected in awards: In 2016, the course was praised by the Society of Friends and Supporters of TU Dresden when it issued its Teaching Award. In 2017, the Friends and Sponsors of the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering presented Daniel Knöfel with the annual prize honoring staff members who have shown particular commitment to teaching at the faculty.

This year, the engineering preparatory course is running from July 23 to September 28. Find out more at www.tu-dresden.de/studium/im-studium/studienstart/vorbereitungskurse and www.vorbereitungskurs-ing.de.

This article appeared in the Dresdner Universitätsjournal (university newspaper, UJ) 13/2018 of September 04, 2018. The complete issue is available as a free PDF download here. Printed copies and PDF files of the university newspaper can be ordered from doreen.liesch@tu-dresden.de. More information can be found at universitaetsjournal.de.