As American manufacturing moves increasingly overseas and immense growth is forecast in modernizing countries like India and China, engineers need to understand those cultures before designing products for them, say supporters of international-engineering programs. The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), which accredits college engineering programs, has made a "broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental, and societal context" part of its criteria. Employers are hunting for graduates with international experience. American colleges have made few inroads in the global-engineering market, and engineering programs face particular challenges in encouraging students to go overseas. Undergraduate engineering programs are generally extremely rigorous and very rigid, and students have to follow a strict sequence of courses to get a degree within four years. Engineering students often come from working-class backgrounds and usually do not have the luxury of taking a semester off for a foreign excursion. Poor marketing may be another issue: engineering students do not go overseas because foreign study has not traditionally been a focus for the field. Others are skeptical that engineering schools will ever send overseas a critical mass of students. Some, citing that most of the study-abroad programs in engineering are based on reciprocal arrangements with overseas universities, and American higher education could not absorb the number of students necessary to make these arrangements work, advocate scaling up international experiences by going online but most observers say the only way to truly learn about a culture is to be immersed in it. The styles of global-engineering programs found at various colleges varies widely. Three engineering programs have emerged as models of approaches to internationalizing engineering. At the University of Rhode Island, the focus is on language: from freshman year on, students study a language along with their engineering requirements. In their fourth year, students travel to one of the four countries to study language and engineering at universities that have formed partnerships with Rhode Island. After their studies, they spend six months working at a company in one of those countries. Purdue's global-engineering program is based on international design teams -- Purdue students are matched up with those in Germany, China, India, and Mexico, and they work on projects and take classes in the United States for a semester, then go overseas for a semester during their junior year. To help nurture a sense of community, they are introduced as freshmen. Sustainability is one of the main themes of Worcester Polytechnic Institute's program, which sends about half of each graduating class overseas to more than a dozen locations. Worcester Polytechnic is able to attract so many students to the program because the trips are a short seven weeks and terms at WPI are on a modified quarter system, designed to accommodate the trips and other projects. Many of WPI's global-studies locations are in nations where students work with nongovernmental organizations on projects that do not necessarily have an intense engineering focus. Some of the enduring lessons of an overseas experience come from interactions between students and a blending of views. In Asia, American students will encounter highly competitive Indian and Chinese peers who must be among the very top students at their schools to get into universities. German students surprise some of the Americans when they put environmental issues as a top concern of their projects. American students are concerned with cost and performance. Such an epiphany may fundamentally differ from a student's original vision of an engineering career.