The Notre Dame College of Engineering has updated its strategic priorities for 2025 – 2029. While our mission, vision, and goals remain steadfast — grounded in Notre Dame’s Catholic heritage and our commitment to engineering a better world for all — our objectives have been refined to embrace the opportunities and challenges of a rapidly changing world.
Mission
Guided by Notre Dame’s mission to be a powerful force for good, the Notre Dame College of Engineering plays a leading role in developing solutions for the challenges facing society and our world. We do this by:
- Striving to be an inclusive community that educates the whole person, so that all students — both at the undergraduate and graduate level — reach their full potential;
- Forming skilled, ethical engineers who act for the authentic good of all; and
- Conducting research that transforms fundamental discoveries into technologies with broad impact.
Vision
We will engineer a better world for all through unsurpassed education and innovative research — discovering and integrating knowledge; advancing human health and well-being; supporting the sustainability of our built and natural environment; and promoting fair and equitable systems and technologies.
Goals
The Strategic Plan for the College of Engineering outlines four primary goals, all of which build on the foundation of Notre Dame’s Catholic heritage.
Provide an unsurpassed undergraduate engineering education, offering the support and flexibility that enable all students to realize their full potential.
- Establish a culture of continual evaluation and improvement of our curricula, student experience, and outcomes to prepare students to thrive in a complex world.
- Increase opportunities and access for experiential learning, both within the classroom and through extracurricular activities, to support the holistic development of each student.
- Empower each student to make informed choices in their educational and career paths through a comprehensive advising ecosystem that includes:
- Professional advisors
- Faculty
- Career Center Resources
- Careers Courses
- Alumni
- Foster a college-wide culture that promotes and rewards excellence, creativity, and dedication among faculty, staff, and teaching assistants to enhance the overall undergraduate student experience.
Enable our graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to excel in meaningful and fulfilling careers by deepening their knowledge and skills through interdisciplinary research opportunities, holistic mentoring, and training that incorporates the human perspective.
- Strengthen and broaden graduate student recruitment in partnership with departments, programs, institutes, centers, and the Graduate School.
- Continually enhance holistic support, retention, recognition, productivity, and placement of graduate students, as well as postdoctoral scholars.
- Implement new offerings for graduate students that are responsive to today’s needs and challenges, and informed by periodic reviews of academic and career development programs.
Advance our research by taking a leading role in addressing important challenges facing all of humanity, discovering new knowledge and pursuing its translation into engaged and ethical solutions.
- Assess our core experimental and computational facilities to verify they meet the needs of researchers. Identify any gaps and forecast future requirements.
- Evaluate current research partnerships to develop strategies that foster and enhance impactful collaborations with both our internal and external partners.
- Align research resources across the college with key priorities of the College and University to amplify research and innovation.
- Foster a college-wide culture that promotes and rewards research excellence and societal impact.
Attract and support an engineering community of students, faculty, staff, and alumni — one that reflects our shared commitment to the University’s values of inclusive excellence and fosters an environment where everyone can thrive. Inspired by Catholic social teaching, we strive to respect the dignity of every person; build a community in which all can flourish; and live in solidarity with all, particularly the most vulnerable.
- Establish and maintain a College culture that is welcoming of, responsive to, and supportive of all community members.
- Recruit, support, and retain excellent staff and faculty from all backgrounds, ensuring a totality of perspectives and experiences are valued and integrated.
- Provide and integrate inclusive curricula, programs, and support structures that attract and facilitate the success of undergraduate students from all backgrounds.
- Identify, recruit, and support graduate students from all backgrounds, providing resources to ensure their success from admission to graduation.
- Deliver outreach programs that introduce pre-college students to opportunities in engineering and the positive impact the field can have on society.