While completing course pre-registration on Courses@Brown this week, undergraduates may notice the absence of a course that has been offered for five consecutive years: ENGN 0032: “Introduction to Engineering: Design.”
ENGN 0032 will not be offered in the 2025-26 academic year, Tejal Desai ’94, dean of engineering, confirmed in an email to The Herald. Desai wrote that the content of ENGN 0030: “Introduction to Engineering” will be supplemented with two new design engineering modules, including “several elements of ENGN 0032.”
ENGN 0030 will be offered in two time slots in fall 2025 and is “currently built to accommodate 360 students,” which is more seats than the combined number of students in ENGN 0030 and ENGN 0032 in the past, Desai wrote.
In a Feb. 6 email to last semester’s ENGN 0032 TAs, Michael Donohue, the course’s instructor, wrote that he had “decided to step down from teaching ENGN 0032.”
Donohue declined to comment.
When asked whether ENGN 0032 will be offered in future years, Desai wrote that engineering course offerings are reevaluated annually “to make sure we are meeting the needs of our students.”
The idea for ENGN 0032 was born out of a Departmental Independent Study in 2018 and was first offered as a traditional course in fall 2020. That semester, 19 students were enrolled in the course taught by Donohue and aided by three undergraduate TAs. By fall 2024, 116 students were enrolled in ENGN 0032 and 28 undergraduate TAs helped lead the course.
ENGN 0032 saw its enrollment peak in fall 2023 with 346 students, when ENGN 0030 wasn’t offered due to changes in faculty and a review of the core curriculum, The Herald previously reported. At its peak, ENGN 0032 had approximately 60 TAs.
That year, the biggest complaint from ENGN 0032 students was that the course wasn’t challenging enough, former ENGN 0032 head TA Melany Gomez ’25 explained. As a project-based course, ENGN 0032 is a meant to introduce students to engineering as an industry.
She called those criticisms “very valid,” she said, adding that “it just shows that there needs to be two classes.”
Ryan Peng ’25, who was a head TA for the course last semester, noted that within engineering, a common consideration is “how accessible the curriculum is versus how much we’re empowering students to actually do on their own.”
“The reason I love ENGN 0032, and why I became a TA, was because it allowed me — somebody who didn’t take a calculus class (in high school) — to believe I could become an engineer,” Gomez said.
The course “stood out so much” because it was project-based, Paula Romero ’28 said. She took the course last fall and was hoping to TA for it.
ENGN 0032 also featured guest lectures from industry professionals that Charlie Fitzgerald ’28 described as “valuable.” Fitzgerald decided to take ENGN 0032 after seeing a career fair flyer at the beginning of the year, which highlighted the differences between ENGN 0032 and ENGN 0030. “It was such a no-brainer for me to do something that looked way more fun,” he said.
Throughout the year, students completed three projects, including a final project encompassing anything from building an electric guitar to a bionic robot dog, according to the ENGN 0032 website.
Shine Gerkariah ’28 built an endoscopy model for their final project. They also designed an accessible door for people with disabilities.
Their door design — created for the course’s introductory “Engineer Your Frustrations” project — “emphasized the importance of being very specific with your target audience,” they said.
For her month-long final project, Romero built a space terrarium with a group of other students. The project was completed in collaboration with an industry partner, the Spring Institute for Forests on the Moon.
The course’s TAs “had pretty much universal oversight of what the class would be, and so it was very TA-driven, which I really did enjoy,” said Andrew Mombay ’27, who was a TA for the course last semester.
Last semester’s TAs revised the course’s projects and brought in new content in preparation for the fall 2024 course, Mombay explained.
“It’s definitely a shame,” he said. “A lot of the work done on the class is now kind of just gone.”
ENGN 0032 is “a really big course that just kind of tries to support everyone,” Dani DeDona ’26 said. DeDona said they were a TA for the course for two years and was slated to be a head TA next year.
“Mike (Donohue) was a really big reason for why I stuck with the class, and also just kind of the community circle that we had with TAs,” DeDona added.
Peng said that he too was able to find community in the ENGN 0032 TAs.
“I’m sad to see the class go,” he said. “But I think that as long as there are people interested in design at Brown, design will live on at Brown.”
Kate Rowberry is a senior staff writer at The Herald.
