The major of building environment and energy application engineering is one of the core supporting majors for achieving the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality strategy. However, in recent years, this major has faced the problems of declining attractiveness to students and loss of excellent students. In this regard, this paper proposes to enhance students’ professional identity, stimulate their internal learning motivation, and increase their confidence in the major. As the students’ first practical contact with the major, professional cognition internships can effectively achieve the above goals. Therefore, this study advances the professional cognition internships to the freshman year, and puts forward a curriculum reform approach featuring earlier curriculum arrangement, content innovation, access to cutting-edge technologies, and ideological and political guidance. At the same time, a teaching team with deep professional passion, broad academic vision and student empathy is constructed to realize the two-way transmission of emotional cognition and professional knowledge through internship teaching. Currently, the above reform schemes have been applied to the practical teaching of the building environment and energy application engineering major at Nanjing Tech University, and continuous optimization and exploration will be conducted in subsequent practice.