On Engineering Students’ Professional Association For Innovative Talents Cultivating

Innovation is the inexhaustible motivation of the social development. Since our country is paying more attention to innovation, it is the responsibility of universities to cultivate innovative talents in the new period. In order to cultivate more innovative talents for the country and the society, universities should improve the innovative ability of their students not only in the specialized courses but also in extracurricular activities. As one of the important extracurricular organizations of university students, professional associations should make contribution to cultivating innovative talents. Taking a university at Weihai, Shandong Province as an example, this thesis discusses the functions and flaws of the technological and engineering professional associations in cultivating innovative talents and proposes some feasible modes for the technological and engineering professional associations in cultivating innovative talents, so as to provide references to other universities in this field.The methods of literature research, field investigation and qualitative analysis are employed in this thesis to discuss the feasible mode of utilizing the technological professional associations for universities to cultivate innovative talents. The most important one among all these three methods is field investigation which is realized with questionnaires to obtain more knowledge about the participation on innovative activities of the technological and engineering university students. Based on sufficient materials and through induction and deduction, this thesis proposes some suggestions for university technological and engineering professional associations in cultivating innovative talents.This research investigates the students of a university at Weihai, Shandong Province, which focuses on their ways to obtain the information of the innovative activities, their motivations to participate in the innovative activities and their reasons of failing to participate in the innovative activities. The result of this research shows that university students are generally willing to participate in the innovative activities but their ways to obtain information and to participate are still insufficient. Based on this, it is natural to find the main problems of the mode of the technological and engineering schools in cultivating talents:the students’lack of the necessary humanistic quality, the students’narrow scope of knowledge, the negligence of cultivating and shaping the students’individuality, the lack of the cultivating system for students to practice, the negligence of the participation in after-school activities. However, university professional associations can make up all these defects with their characteristics and functions in cultivating innovative talents, because they provide a stage for students to realize their interest, shape their individualities, cultivate their spirit of making intellectual enquiries and solving real problems with their professional knowledge, which is hard to obtain in their courses.According to the result of this research, university technological and engineering professional associations possess the following advantages in cultivating innovative talents:providing a stage for universities to carry out innovative activities, promoting the employment of the graduating class, combining closely the first and second classroom and cultivating numerous top-notch talents, etc. They are still insufficient in the directing of professional teachers, the guarantee of funds, the communication among associations and the institution of organization and management, which constrains the development of the professional associations. Several suggestions are proposed after analyses in this thesis to improve the function of university technological and engineering professional associations in cultivating innovative talents, including setting up the mode of the coalition of universities and enterprises, establishing the supervisor-leading system in associations, standardizing the found of the professional associations, creating new forms of associate activities, improving the evaluation system of associations.