Our goal is to provide a personalized engineering learning experience for every Pratt student. We view teaching as a partnership where students and faculty share the responsibility to excel. Through our engineering curriculum we emphasize teamwork, leadership, persuasive oral and written skills, ethics, project management and finance. Our intent is not just to graduate technically competent students, but leaders in their field who can work seamlessly with professionals from other disciplines in both national and international environments.
Explore Reason #1: View the Pratt virtual tour.

We encourage new undergraduates to use their first year as a chance to explore and investigate each of our engineering departments in order to “try on” different career possibilities and see what suits them best. We encourage students to seek interaction with faculty from all departments within Pratt, and our faculty is committed to nurturing student development. We also strongly recommend that all students take EGR 10 - Introduction to Engineering, offered only in the fall semester. This course provides an exposure to the range of disciplinary and multi-disciplinary engineering career opportunities, and creates a practical context for the remainder of first-year study. 

We actively support double engineering majors and pairing engineering with other disciplines as a double major. Students frequently combine engineering with sciences such as computer science, physics, mathematics, economics, and public policy studies. Additional interests such as pre-medicine, pre-law, business, art, music, psychology, and social sciences can also be accommodated. Engineering majors have the ability to focus their curriculum on areas that particularly interest them, such as photonics, aerodynamics, environmental engineering or medical devices.

Through a combination of internships, undergraduate fellowship programs, the Duke Smart House and a structured curriculum, we strive to give each undergraduate student an opportunity for hands-on research experience. We believe this is a critical part of helping students to actualize what they learn in the classroom and to find a career that they will be passionate about. Such research experience makes Pratt students highly competitive for jobs, graduate school admission and scholarships.

A number of arrangements are possible in which the student spends a few weeks, a summer, a semester, or longer in an international locale, including opportunities in England, Australia, Germany, Korea, France, Romania, and many others. This is more than an opportunity to take humanities courses in a foreign country. We are actively reviewing curricula at foreign institutions to expand opportunities for students to take a range of technical courses while abroad, so that the curriculum taken while away from Duke integrates effectively with the rest of the student's program of study. What's more, we highly encourage service learning opportunities--putting your new engineering skills to work where they are needed. Our students do this through a variety of different programs including Engineers Without Borders, Engineering World Health and DukeEngage.

At Duke, students have a wide array of learning options outside the classroom, including student groups and clubs, design contests, service learning, guest lectures and seminars, etc. We encourage students to nurture their curiosity by creating opportunities for exciting, offbeat and even surprising ways to put book learning into practice. Check out our clubs!