Beyond the conventional engineering discipline - teaching prose

The objective was to provide students with means to new innovative ways of thinking. A secondary purpose was to deepen their cultural awareness to act as a realm for disruptive thoughts. To this aim, an experimental literature course for electrical engineering students was created. Students who participated in the literature course were very inspired by it. Each time the literature course has been arranged, students have evaluated it as one of the top three courses of all at the Department of Electrical and Communications Engineering at Helsinki University of Technology. In this study we introduce the course concept and analyze how students benefited from the experiment. The literature course improved four areas of excellence: communication methods, innovative thinking, motivation for more traditional engineering studies and networking. We comprehend that learning prose may not be the key interest of engineering students in general. However, according to our study, a literature course would benefit a minority of the students in their studies and career later on.