Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship
Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship (HESE) is an applied, multidisciplinary program preparing students to create sustainable and scalable global impact. Collaborating to create solutions to real world problems, students immerse themselves in experiences that build lifelong work-life skills and change their worldviews.
Across a three-class sequence plus a Maymester in Kenya, undergraduate and graduate students from all majors collaborate with local stakeholders to co-develop tech-based agriculture, education, and health care ventures designed to impact at least one million people. At Penn State and on the ground in Kenya, students learn by doing to create evidence-based, culturally appropriate, and economically sustainable solutions.
Students completing HESE graduate with international problem solving, entrepreneurship, research, and consulting experience that prepares them for Fortune 100 and start-up companies, for grad school or non-profits, and across sectors as diverse as health and law. HESE alumni have joined companies like Google and Boeing and graduate programs at universities like MIT and Johns Hopkins, reporting that their HESE-gained skills were among the most formative training they had for the real-life problems they encounter.
