Vision & Culture

Our Vision and Mission

In line with the Vision and Mission of Wake Forest University as a collegiate
university that balances the personal attention of a liberal arts college with the academic vitality and broad opportunities of a research university, the heart of Wake Forest’s Department of Engineering is the teacher-scholar ideal. In small classes and cutting-edge research labs, professors practice their art with a keen interest in students and their lives. 

Our students will graduate with a B.S. Engineering degree and have an exemplary undergraduate experience infused with a liberal education. We strive to be a leader in undergraduate education through innovation in the curriculum, effective learning methods, an authentic liberal arts education educating the whole person, and a project-based curriculum that emphasizes creative design and partnerships.

Our vision is to cultivate graduates who are:

• Leaders and agents of change embodying the WFU motto of Pro Humanitate (for humanity)
• Active seekers and creators of knowledge
• Empowered with the engineering fundamentals and the breadth of an exceptional liberal arts education
• Adaptive experts
• Innovators who embrace inclusion, diversity, and equity
• Fearless in the face of complex problems.

To achieve this vision, Wake Engineering must embody and model these attributes at every level, including our staff and faculty.

Our Focus on Culture

As a program, we celebrate our values of Empowerment, Integrity, Inclusion, Compassion, Growth, and Joy. These values inform and influence every aspect of who we are, what we do, and how we do it, from our classroom environment to our undergraduate program to our expectations for how we treat each other. Embracing our values is central to delivering our B.S. Engineering curriculum and the culture that we have cultivated within our Wake Engineering community.

One tangible and extensive element of this work is our program’s dedicated effort to infuse entrepreneurial learning with character development opportunities throughout the curriculum, supported with ideas and collaborators from within the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), a part of the Kern Family Foundation. The particular elements of character, which broadly include intellectual, performance, civic, and moral virtues, offer a distinctive approach to help our engineering students cultivate in themselves purpose, responsibility, service, resilience, curiosity, creativity, humility, honesty, justice, courage, and practical wisdom. In Wake Engineering, we believe that this is especially important because many of our engineers will go forward to significantly impact the culture of the engineering profession. How they impact that culture, in turn, impacts how the engineering profession engages with and impacts humanity. Learn more.