Retreats for Christian and Engineering Virtue Formation

Franciscan University of Steubenville Department of Engineering and Computing has as its mission to be guided by our Catholic faith, driven by innovation: to form virtuous engineering and computing professionals to serve the authentic good with skill and excellence. While academically these are programs targeted to meet the ABET standards for program excellence, this mission explicitly embraces the formation of its students in Christian virtues pursuant to their vocation as engineers and computing professionals. As the formation of Christian virtue extends well beyond the classroom, the department remains committed to extra-curricular requirements to support student formation, primarily in the form of an intentional cohort retreat program. This paper describes the motivation, organization, and expanded implementation of a series of cohort retreats that intersect between vocation and identity formation with the goal of connecting students to personal and professional virtues that support their development as Christian men and women and as competent engineers.