2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

What happens when a Middle Eastern country invites a leading U.S. university to deliver its world-class engineering degrees 8,000 miles from its home campus? In 2002, Texas A&M University established an international campus in Qatar at the request of the host nation. The mandate was ambitious: create four ABET-accredited engineering programs to cultivate highly skilled local graduates and support the country’s long-term development goals.
While all programs were shaped by strong industry advisory boards and rigorous admission standards, including interviews and high rates of multilingual proficiency, Petroleum Engineering (PETE) developed a particularly distinctive feature: a required, one-credit seminar course. In this course, students worked individually or as a team to solve real-world industry problems and presented their solutions directly to program advisory board members. The seminar became a proving ground where students demonstrated technical competence, teamwork, and professional communication skills to potential employers. As a result, the course not only strengthened student preparedness for the workforce but also provided employers with direct insight into graduates’ readiness to contribute effectively in professional settings.
This presentation reports on five years of data drawn from student projects and advisory board interviews. Findings show how PETE’s seminar course not only enhanced employability outcomes but also exemplified the workplace-informed approach that guided the entire international campus. Lessons from this study offer broad insights into how global partnerships can advance engineering education and prepare graduates for professional success.