Celebrating the Individual: Encouraging Engineering Students to Find Their Voice

Celebrating the Individual:  Encouraging Engineering Students to Find Their Voice

Lisa G. Bullard, Carol K. Hall, and David F. Ollis

Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

North Carolina State University

Studies on retention of freshman engineering students have a common theme; students who persist in engineering report a feeling of belonging and a “fit” with the organizational culture.  In addition, they make connections with faculty and other students.  In order to facilitate this, the authors have implemented several mechanisms throughout the curriculum to encourage students to reflect on their personal journey and express their individuality. 

In several classes the students' first assignment is to submit a one-page autobiography, using autobiographies of the instructors as models.  Our autobiographies included information about our families and personal interests as well as our academic interests, and we encouraged the students to do the same in theirs. We compile a composite portrait of the class from the autobiographies and share it as a memo to the students. Another approach to this (for smaller classes) is to form pairs and ask each pair to interview the other and introduce their partner to the rest of the class, with a few introductions occurring in each class over the course of several weeks.  The results of the brief interviews are compiled and distributed to the class.  Our goals in these exercises are to give the students a sense of their instructors as somewhat normal and approachable human beings and to help them start to develop a sense of community as a cohort.

An initial challenge in our junior professional development course is to open the student up to writing reflectively about some key positive factors (parents, mentors, teachers, etc) or negative experiences (roadblocks and resolutions) important in the student's life.   To invite such atypical introspection, we ask students to first view Randy Pausch's “Last lecture” video to demonstrate his response to an insurmountable personal challenge: his diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer in his mid-forties. We have been impressed over time with the depth and openness demonstrated by our student writers in this first writing opportunity, and their candor in discussing their roadblock and barriers.   This writing also sets the stage for a subsequent mock job interview, during which students are asked about their resiliency, e.g., behavior in   challenging and difficult personal, work, or school situations, and what they learned from (attempted) resolutions.

Several instructors in our department invite students to submit as extra credit a creative expression of their experience in the course.  Typical submissions range from poems to artwork to music videos to edible creations.  This assignment encourages students to reflect on their experience in the course and to attempt to express that experience in a tangible way. Hearing other students bemoan the difficulty of the class or the fear with which they approached it helps incoming students understand that they are not alone in their apprehension.  It provides an outlet for those students with a creative bent to express their individuality, hopefully dispelling the stereotype that engineers aren't creative. Finally, sharing the extra credit submissions on the last day of class ends the semester on a positive and often humorous note and serves to create an indelible memory for both the students and the instructor.