The Grand Challenge Scholars Program

GCSP is a 3-year, scholarship based program designed to prepare students to be world changers.

Students will build a portfolio of achievements with the guidance of professors and business sponsors, encompassing five components:

1. Hands-on Project or Research Experience: Related to a Grand Challenge
2. Interdisciplinary Curriculum: A curriculum that complements engineering fundamentals with courses in other fields, preparing engineering students to work at the overlap with public policy, business, law, ethics, human behavior, risk, and the arts, as well as medicine and the sciences
3. Entrepreneurship: Preparing students to translate invention to innovation; to develop market ventures that scale to global solutions in the public interest
4. Global Dimension: Developing the students’ global perspective necessary to address challenges that are inherently global as well as to lead innovation in a global economy
5. Service Learning: Developing and deepening students’ social consciousness and their motivation to bring their technical expertise to bear on societal problems through mentored experiential learning with real clients

Acceptance into the GCSP will provide students with:

• $500 per semester
• Research grants
• Business development grants
• Travel support to conferences
• Service learning grants

Applications

This program is for Undergraduate Campus students only, who have three years of study left before graduation. Highly motivated soon-to-be-sophomores or current sophomores are welcome to apply. Applications will be emailed to all students in April of each year, or you can contact Dustin McNally at the address below.

Contact Us

If you have any questions, please contact Dustin McNally at dustin.mcnally@UND.edu

The Grand Challenges

UND’s College of Engineering & Mine’s Grand Challenge Scholars Program is fully endorsed by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

The program is designed to educate a new generation of engineers to take on some of the most pressing issues facing society today by solving one of the 14 Grand Challenges:

• Advance personalized learning
• Make solar energy economical
• Enhance virtual reality
• Reverse-engineer the brain
• Engineer better medicines
• Advance health informatics
• Restore Improve Urban Infrastructure
• Secure cyberspace
• Provide access to clean water
• Provide energy from fusion
• Prevent nuclear terror
• Manage the nitrogen cycle
• Develop carbon sequestration methods
• Engineer tools of scientific discovery