Indiana Wesleyan’s first ever class engineering students will be graduating this spring with the class of 2025.
“It’s an awesome opportunity, I think, just to cement kind of a legacy on campus, but also to kind of pioneer the way for future students,” said senior mechanical engineering student Trey Denigan.
Denigan said he transferred to IWU from Northern Kentucky University for the competitive soccer program and quality engineering program.
Engineering Program Director and professor of mechanical engineering, Dr. David Che, said that athletics is the reason a lot of engineering students originally came to Indiana Wesleyan.
“Of the five (graduating seniors), we have four athletes,” Che said. “They came here for athletic reasons, but once they found out we were starting engineering, they quickly jumped into it.”
Electrical engineering student Hannah Ruppert, on the other hand, said that she decided to enroll at IWU because she was looking for a small Christian college close to home. She said that she liked everything about IWU except for the fact that there was no engineering program at the time.
“And then, kind of on a whim, my mom was like, just asking the tour guide person if they had engineering, and it was the fall before they were going to launch the program, and they said that they had just hired the person that was going to start up the program,” Ruppert said. “We just trusted that the Lord would provide a good program, even though it wasn’t established yet.”
Che said that the idea for offering an engineering program was originally presented to the Indiana Wesleyan Board of Trustees 12 years ago, but the board chose to start a football program instead. The idea was then revisited five years ago, and Che was hired to start the application process.
“So, everyone approved it, and then we had to submit to the Higher Learning Commission,” Che said. “That’s the accreditation body for the entire university.”
Che said that while Indiana Wesleyan is now authorized to offer a four year engineering degree, the program also has to be accredited by the American Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). One of the steps a university has to take to be ABET accredited is to have at least one student graduate the program.
“This class will be retroactively covered,” Che said. “So once we get accredited, these students can say ‘yeah, we graduated from an ABET accredited program’.”
Che, who is currently working on getting the engineering program accredited, has started engineering programs at Mount Vernon Nazarene University and Bryan College.
Today, Che said that there are over 60 students in the engineering program. Students can choose to study mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, computer engineering and design engineering.
“It’s just exciting to see how much growth that we’ve had,” Ruppert said.
Denigan said that the program offers the same education that a larger university would, just with smaller class sizes and more opportunities for students to ask for help.
“Literally all Christians today not only are called to do the Great Commission, you know, spread the gospel, but are also called to serve in a tangible way in the society; to produce for others and to serve others through these different career tracks,” Che said. “So engineering is a big part of that, because society is becoming more and more technology-saturated, so there’s just going to be more need for technically educated students.”
