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How do you cultivate engineering leaders?

If we were to work backwards from the courses we teach engineers, we’d be forced to recognize that most of what engineering leadership means to us is technical competence. To be sure, technical competence is a necessary component of leadership. But on its own, it is insufficient for effective leadership.

It’s not that we don’t know where we want to go. If you look at the stated goals of most engineering programs, you'll see something that connects to the ABET student outcomes. These statements are things that all students should demonstrate by the end of their engineering education.

1. an ability to identify, formulate, and solve complex engineering problems by applying principles of engineering, science, and mathematics.

2. an ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors.

3. an ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences.

4. an ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities in engineering situations and make informed judgments, which must consider the impact of engineering solutions in global, economic, environmental, and societal contexts.

5. an ability to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative environment, establish goals, plan tasks, and meet objectives.

6. an ability to develop and conduct appropriate experimentation, analyze and interpret data, and use engineering judgment to draw conclusions.

7. an ability to acquire and apply new knowledge as needed, using appropriate learning strategies.

For those of you keeping score at home, I count at least three items that relate directly to leadership, ethical formation, and societal impact (2, 4, and 5). And yet, despite the relatively healthy representation on this list of student outcomes, these outcomes don't often get the top billing in the curriculum. Much more frequently, they are implicit outcomes of our courses.

On the one hand, it makes sense. From an assessment angle, these outcomes can be tricky to define and measure. It’s easy to measure if someone can solve a differential equation. It’s much more challenging to articulate whether they are able to make informed judgments that consider the impact of their work on society.

To make matters worse, there tends to be a perception that ethical and moral formation are "soft skills" that are somehow less important than the harder technical skills needed to design experiments, build instruments, and create new engineering solutions.

But at the end of the day, we must ensure that students are equipped not only with the ability to build, but the wisdom to know how and why to build. As I wrote last summer, they need to exhibit competence, capacity, and character. It’s that last bit that all too often doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

The building blocks of character

One framework that has been helpful in my reflection about cultivating character is the framework above from The Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues. The figure provides a helpful model of how practical wisdom is built on the formation of virtue. It articulates four categories of virtues:

1. Intellectual virtues

2. Moral virtues

3. Civic virtues

4. Performance virtues

When I look at that list of virtues, I can see many that directly connect to the work my students are doing. The intellectual virtues are a natural area of resonance with technical training. We want students to train their intellect and build skills that they can apply to solve problems. Likewise, we naturally cultivate performance virtues in our classes by providing our students with challenging work to complete both as individuals and in teams.

However, the moral and civic virtues are not ones we tend to talk about frequently. At least I don't. When was the last time that I talked to my students in class about an experience that taught me to be humble or a time when I needed to exhibit courage? Or shared about a time when I demonstrated awareness of my neighbor or spent my time serving others? What about a time that I failed and had to own up to my mistake and ask for forgiveness?

If I'm being honest, these topics are rarely part of what I share with students in class. Part of that is understandable. These are the kind of topics that lend themselves to conversation. They're best held in a seminar format with discussion, not in a larger classroom setting where not everyone can participate in the conversation.

But even that is not being fully honest. Deep down, I think we really believe these ideas don't deserve equal standing with the technical content of our classes. Our choice to dedicate time and space to these discussions is a statement about our values.

So again I ask myself, what would it look like to design an engineering program where cultivating practical wisdom is the central goal?

How and why to cultivate engineering leaders at Harvey Mudd

The reason that I'm so amped up about this is that I believe Harvey Mudd is a place where this sort of engineering program could become a reality. If you spend some time reading about the founding of the college, you'll see that this sort of thing was exactly what the founders had in mind. In Harvey Mudd College: The First Twenty Years1 inaugural president, Joe Platt writes:

[S]ociety at large was being reshaped by new technologies such as air travel, nuclear weapons, and television, as nineteenth-century Britain was reshaped by the steam engine or nineteenth-century North America by the railroads, but the reshaping was coming more rapidly. Accordingly, an important part of the responsibility of the engineer is to anticipate the social effects of engineering activity and to design systems and advise clients in ways likely to maximize the social utility of an engineering development. This understanding requires a breadth of education not built into many engineering curricula in fields such as political economy, psychology, and history.

This emphasis on the importance of a broad education alongside training in the humanities, the social sciences, and the arts is also front and center in the college's mission statement.

Harvey Mudd College seeks to educate engineers, scientists and mathematicians well versed in all of these areas and in the humanities, social sciences and the arts so that they may assume leadership in their fields with a clear understanding of the impact of their work on society.

The parallels between the historical moment when the college was founded in the wake of technological and scientific developments of the 1930s and 1940s and our current moment should not escape us. We are entering a new moment with the artificial intelligence boom that will create a similar scale of societal disruption and global tension.

As we see the challenges facing our world, we have an opportunity to double down on our commitments to cultivate not only technically excellent graduates, but graduates with practical wisdom.

A path to prototype our way forward

To meet this moment, we need to create opportunities for students to reflect on and cultivate their character and leadership capacity alongside their technical training. Before I joined the department, one of my now-retired colleagues sparked the idea for an Engineering Leadership Program. We should revive it.

The program is centered on three main pillars:

1. Leading yourself

2. Leading others

3. Leading your cause

Together, these provide a container for engineers to consider the importance of their development as people and the way that their own personal character can play a role in helping them to have an influence on the world around them.

Seeded by this idea and framework, here’s the playbook I’d like to run.

1. Create a consistent one-credit seminar course to accompany the major

From a nuts-and-bolts perspective, I would implement this as a one-credit seminar course that would sit alongside an engineering major’s technical courses while at Mudd. The program would start during the sophomore year, once students have declared a major. Year one would focus on leading yourself, year two on leading others, and year three on leading your cause. Importantly, these topics would serve to prepare students for the design and professional practice courses that are already a part of our curriculum, namely E80 in the sophomore spring and Clinic in the junior and senior years.

2. Leverage synergy with existing courses in the curriculum

When adding anything to the curriculum, the added workload for students and faculty is always a concern. However, even a single hour of contact time each week with a few hours each week for reading and reflection outside can tie together some existing threads for students. The idea is not to create a course that would deliver lots of new content, but to create a space for students to reflect on their learning and build leadership skills. The initial prototypes would be offered as an optional course so that enrollment would signal investment in the early iterations of the course, where low-resolution prototypes would be used to iterate on the course design and delivery.

The course could also serve as a home for some of the prototyping mindset work that has already (quite successfully) been prototyped in the department for several years, most prominently in two courses developed by my colleague based on materials from the Stanford Life Design Lab: Prototyping Your Mudd and Prototyping Your Future Self. I could also envision a natural overlap for some of the work that our NSF-funded Systems Thinking for Environmental and Ethical Engineering Practices (STEEEP) team is developing. Many of the topics in the three categories of the engineering leadership program are already a part of those courses, so there is natural synergy.

3. Strengthen connections with students’ liberal arts classes

In addition to serving as a consistent sidecar to accompany more technically-focused classes, the engineering leadership program would also provide a place to more tightly integrate and motivate the importance of the liberal arts. Mudd is a liberal arts college, and all students at the college take at least ten courses across the humanities, social sciences, and the arts. The leadership seminar, taught by engineering faculty, would provide an opportunity for us to signal the value of these courses by explicitly drawing on the skills and competencies that they build, providing a place for students to reflect on the connections between what they are learning in the humanities and in their engineering courses, and a space to offer opportunities for cross-department collaboration.

4. Tap into near-peer mentoring and cross-year pollination

Lastly, this set of seminars would serve as a natural opportunity for cross-year mentoring and collaboration. The courses would be designed to be taken on a rotating basis so that the topics would be revisited from different angles each year. The set of readings would go on a three-year cycle so that students would never repeat a reading, but each year they would focus on different aspects and serve as mentors. For example, in the first year, students would engage in activities to better understand themselves, whereas in future years, students would facilitate these conversations for their peers. In the final year, students could engage in exercises to consider how these ideas are applicable to their Clinic experience and how the things they are learning might shape their career exploration. This cross-year pollination would help both to minimize the instructional load by engaging students in the facilitation of the seminars and also provide natural, built-in opportunities for students to exercise the leadership skills they have been building.

These are the sorts of ideas and opportunities that excite me about teaching college students in an environment like Harvey Mudd. As a community, we are all drawn to the mission of the college as a place to foster our intellect, but more than that, to grow in understanding the impact and responsibility we have to serve our world.

Our world is in dire need of practical wisdom. We've got plenty of technical expertise, but without virtue-formed character, humble ethical thinking, and deep-seated moral conviction, we are guaranteed to fall short of our aspirations. We need only to open our eyes to see the many ways in which technology seems to be leading us toward a worse future rather than a better one.

Harvey Mudd is a special place, but we have an opportunity to do even more to help our students understand the influence they can have in creating a better future. To do that, they’ll need more than technical skills. They’ll need practical wisdom. I’m here to figure out how to help them cultivate it.

Got a thought? Leave a comment below.

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Reading Recommendations

If you read/listen to one thing this week, let it be this conversation hosted by the

Emerson said, "When we are braced by labors, that's where thinking begins." And all of that is in the interest of the imaginative insights of the individual. All of that should never be short-circuited in the interest of efficiency or the best grade. If we could somehow model the importance of effort and labor, that's what builds the circuit of the deep reader.

Their discussion of Explorer mode vs. Achiever, Disrupter, and Passenger mode and education’s intersection with information, knowledge, and wisdom are particularly good nuggets to tune in for.

I think what we have right now is this almost bifurcation or trifurcation of information, knowledge, and wisdom. And when we are only after information which AI is so good at and its translation into knowledge, which we hope it will complement us, we nevertheless must never forget what does that all mean for humanity, the future of the species. And that's the wisdom part. And so what I hope that the school can give is this sense of translation that we are taking information, we are transmitting it to you so that you will have knowledge from which you'll help propel us wisely.

Although others might have "got on with the future," I’m still stuck on those “obvious threats,” I confess – and not just to academic integrity but to integrity in general.

What happened, I wonder, that prompted this narrative shift, that made AI – a tool of deception (see: the very substance of Turing Test), if not one for cheating – no longer an educational or even a social concern?

The Book Nook

There is perhaps no short story writer I love more than Flannery O’Connor. This week I’ve been enjoying a few of her stories in this collection.

The Professor Is In

This past Saturday was the day I always look forward to each spring. It’s E80 launch day at Dana Point! The weather didn’t quite cooperate this year, and we got rained on pretty good in the middle of the morning, but we made out all right despite being a bit soggy.

At the beginning of the semester, I tell these students that this is the class where I want them to go from thinking of themselves as studying engineering to being an engineer. It’s about building technical skills, teamwork, and determination to keep trying even after many failed attempts. But even more than that, it’s about forming identity and belonging.

All semester long, these budding engineers have worked tirelessly to learn how to build underwater robots. They completed seven labs in teams where they learned how to design electrical instruments, take and analyze data, and understand the tradeoffs that are always a part of engineering design. Over the last month, they designed their own robots, building from our base platform to design and integrate sensors into their bot. Last Saturday, they reaped the fruits of their labor and experienced once again the hard-won joy of engineering.

Leisure Line

The new pizza garden is planted.

Still Life

A shot of a rose blooming across the street.