C&C Seminars

Spring 2022

Course Descriptions 

Presenting Topics in Engineering 

This seminar focuses on the presentation and collaboration skills that are essential to demonstrating your technical experience and expertise in the job search and the workforce. You’ll practice presenting to multiple audiences and will have the opportunity to showcase your current or past work to potential employers.  

Participants will:

  • Develop a presentation that showcases their experience, expertise and professional communication skills for the job search and workforce.
  • Build digital literacy and workplace communication skills
  • Practice professional teamwork and collaboration techniques.

Shaping a Career Narrative

This seminar offers a series of process-based steps that will help develop resumes, cover letters, bios and statements of interest for professional portfolios. You will also learn key job search tips and how to tailor your materials to fit specific job ads. 

Participants will:

  • Develop resumes, cover letters, and other key portfolio documents
  • Build job search strategies tailored to their career needs
  • Learn to identify keywords in job ads and methods for incorporating them in job documents.

Developing and Implementing Technical Vocabulary

This seminar focuses on building technical vocabulary, contextualizing terminology for multiple audiences, including clients, other engineers, and experts. You will collaborate with seminar members to investigate contemporary engineering trends and topics and present your findings.

Participants will:

  • Build, practice, and implement technical vocabulary that reflect current concerns in engineering and will support them in their job search
  • Develop a team project to showcase vocabulary for expert and non-expert audiences
  • Practice written and oral communication across industry sectors

Issues in Engineering: Local Interventions and Problem Solving in our Communities

This seminar will focus on current engineering issues impacting the New York metropolitan area. You will work together in teams to research the topic, develop an intervention plan, and pitch your project.

Participants will:

  • Develop a public-facing team project plan that addresses an immediate need faced by a local community
  • Work with the tools of architecture and engineering fields to find innovative solutions to contemporary engineering issues
  • Practice professional communication including memos, project pitches, and other modes of workplace communication

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.