Is it really possible to do it that quickly?
We strongly believe that a mulit-decade plan is not the way to go. It takes too long for our national goals, it will be very expensive, and the players and stakeholders will change too many times for the program to ever really get developed and adopted. For these reasons we propose to implement this in Quick Reaction Engineering fashion in a five year plan: begin the program in 2025, launch the first Freshman in 2026, graduate the first students in 2030, and have an established national program with a school in every state by the end of 2030.
How is this possible?
The Freshman courses are relatively easy to develop and not much different from the pilot program already proven in the CORE program and the BUILD program piloted at the University of Louisville over the last few years. With this in mind, we can develop national versions of lesson plans, syllabi, and the Mentor training program within a year as well as establishing scaled program logistics. We immediately start recruiting schools which means developing brochures, videos, etc. and start training a cadre of BUILD advocates to recruit universities. We recruit students in high schools at the same time. We immediately form a partnership with FIRST robotics as described elsewhere. We train the mentors over the next 12 months. The first set of schools - which we hope to number in double digits the first year - begins teaching the program in Fall of 2026. This is aggressive, but if we want to do this, it can be done.
During that year the first set of Freshman go through the program while we concurrently develop the Sophomore course. With this approach we can be ready for Freshman in 2026, Sophomores 2027, Juniors in 2028, and and Seniors in 2029. Our first graduating class will graduate in Spring 2030.
It is aggressive and yet possible with acceptable costs and risks. We know how to do this. This is what we have done over the last 40 years. We believe this is the lowest cost and lowest risk approach.
In order to fulfill national needs, we must train engineers for work in modern environments: diverse multidisciplinary teams blending theory with practical knowledge and applying both to the manufacturing process.
And we need to do it quickly.
Summary: What’s in this for you?
This page is about how we got the BUILD program up and running quickly. Really quickly. This is what a few of the BUILD creators got really good at doing in their careers - doing things surprisingly quickly. We’ve sprinkled our philosophies throughout the program and you, too, will learn to do things more quickly than most people. I don’t think I need to tell you just how useful this is.