Universidad Industrial de Santander - UIS

The Universidad Industrial de Santander is located in Bucaramanga which is known as "The Beautiful City", in northeast of Colombia.

Bucaramanga is the capital of the Santander region and is surrounded by the Chicamocha Canyon, the Páramo de Berlín and the municipality of Lebrija.

UIS opened in 1948 to meet the need for engineers in Colombia when industry began to flourish and was one of the first public universities to obtain (and maintain) high quality accreditation from the Ministry of Education in Colombia.

The university’s main campus is in Bucaramanga (with five locations) and four other campuses throughout Santander. It has about 23,000 students: 19,000 undergraduate and 4,000 graduate students.

The university has six deaneries, 36 departments and offers 45 undergraduate programmes; it also has 49 graduate specialisation programmes, 50 master's degrees and 10 doctorates. There are around 1,891 faculty members, and 1,087 administrative members.

UIS houses one of the three technology parks supported by the Ministry of Science of Colombia, Guatiguará Technology Park, which has 14 research centres and specialised laboratories. Additionally, UIS holds about 98 research groups, 11 scientific journals and 73 national and international patents, with more applications for intellectual property in the process.

Programmes are taught in Spanish; however, the university has a Foreign Languages programme with a major in English and a bachelor’s in literature taught in English, French and Portuguese. Courses in Spanish as a second language for international students are offered.

UIS’s Language Institute enables students to take up to level 5 English and two levels in French, Portuguese and Italian. German and Korean is also offered through the language assistants programme, and through university partnerships, Mandarin-Chinese is also available.