The engineering is an academic discipline which aims to produce professional able to deal with the increasingly complex problems that humanity lives with answers and creative solutions and materially profitable. In today's globalized world, problems are increasingly more complex and require both holistic and heuristic visions to determine possible solutions which makes necessary that engineering be considered from these perspectives. For optimum job performance, engineers must develop a series of specific professional competences by leveraging the role of mathematics courses, particularly calculus. In the present essay is valued the role of calculus courses at the University of Costa Rica to aims at assessing the contribution of these courses in the development of competences required in engineering. It also analyzes whether the current curricular structure may be not contributes to the improvement of these competences because no consider the difference between learning styles which, in one way or another, are inherent to them and that are unique to engineering.

Engineering; mathematics; competences; learning styles; Costa Rica