The origins of the Faculty of Engineering go back to the year 1849, when the School of Arts and Crafts (EAO) was born in the context of an accelerated modernization process that the country was experiencing and that led to a growing need for the development of technical education. . In its beginnings, the EAO had a staff of 24 students, distributed in 4 workshops: blacksmithing, carpentry, mechanics and foundry. Its mission was to promote the well-being and progress of the less well-off class, training educated workers capable of improving the country's industrial situation.
Years later, in 1947, the State Technical University-UTE was created, bringing together several higher technical schools from the National University of Santiago and from all over the country. The school began with the specialties of Mechanical Engineering, Electricity, Metallurgy, Chemistry and Mines.
Today, the USACH Faculty of Engineering is one of the most consolidated in Chile, with ten academic departments and more than 11,000 undergraduate students, in addition to 20 engineering programs (14 of them civil engineering), Masters, Doctorates and educational offerings. continues according to the needs of the industry.
In 2014, the Faculty of Engineering was awarded the Corfo New Engineering for 2030 project, as a boost from the public entity to Chilean universities that teach engineering degrees, to transform their schools into study centers with international standards. Our Faculty is working on this transformative project in a Consortium, to which the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso and the University of Concepción also belong. Making the objectives of this project compatible with those of the institutional strategic plan, the Faculty has promoted and will promote skills in applied engineering, has promoted and will promote research, with a strengthening of articulations with other internal and external academic units, to form networks and promote mobility; Likewise, it will install the capacity to generate public policies to improve the training of engineers in the country.
Today, the Faculty of Engineering has its Civil Engineering courses shortened to 5 and a half years and a new curricular path of innovation and entrepreneurship.
In addition to this milestone, the Board of Directors of the University of Santiago approved the creation of the Mechatronics Civil Engineering, Telematics Civil Engineering and Biomedical Civil Engineering careers, and recently, the creation of the Department that will host them, which corresponds to the Department of Engineering Multidisciplinary. This was a reality after 2 years of work by different academic commissions that proposed new lines of training and development, according to the needs of the industry and the modernization of Engineering. All are based on collaborative and multidisciplinary work and are limited to new areas of impact, in terms of knowledge and technology transfer.
The Faculty has a Strategic Development Unit, a cross-sectional area that includes the Computer Services Subdirectorate, the Communications Subdirectorate, the Quality and Continuous Improvement Subdirectorate, and the IT Projects and Information Security Subdirectorate; a Curriculum Trajectory Sub-directorate, an International Relations Sub-directorate, a Research and Innovation Sub-directorate and a Link with the National Public and Productive Sector Sub-directorate.
In addition to this, in 2018 the Faculty's Innovation Center was inaugurated, a place that has 480 m2, destined to generate technological innovation for the industry and strong support for the development of technological enterprises. The Center already has the approval of an extension to promote innovation more strongly.
Since that same year, the Faculty, through 3 academics, is part of the great national Advanced Manufacturing project and, in 2019, it was awarded participation in the Circular Economy mega-consortium for the macro North Zone, a priority project of Corfo, It has financing for 10 years.
At present, the development of applied R&D at the Faculty places us in a relevant position by having 10 Center programs that work on lines of research that range from mathematical modeling, through computational intelligence, failure analysis, mechanical of fractures, industrial logistics, software and big data platforms, sanitary landfills, biological and thermal treatment, territorial planning, environmental management, robotics, structural integrity, up to lithium, the circular economy, advanced manufacturing and hydrogen.
Another important milestone is the construction of the Faculty's Teaching Innovation Building. The place has 1,500 square meters and eight floors. It includes rooms for 100, 60 and 30 students and about 2,000 students will be housed there.
Get to know the book "Engineering, a legacy
