I Should Not be Expected to Teach English!...But

This paper addresses a widely ignored fact, “Engineering professors ARE English teachers!” They do not teach literature or the structure of the novel. They do not provide grammar quizzes every Friday. And they certainly don’t give popular movie reviews of all the shows they watched on a given weekend. On the other hand, they spend a great deal of their professional lives writing journal articles and conference papers, reviewing articles written by other faculty, and being the mentors for untold numbers of theses and dissertations. Life as an engineering faculty member requires the writing and review of two major documents in their own lives: the thesis and the dissertation. Even the youngest assistant professor has been closely connected to writing a spectacular document and what it means to do so. It would be an interesting study to see how many faculty members never made a comment on the theses and dissertations of their own students. Faculty members should think beyond the technical assignments that are given to students to issues that are raised in their own writing and speaking. These activities are important to students so that they can see the necessity of communicating well for their future success. Students will more readily accept the premise that communication is a vital part of an engineer's life if they are given that information along with their technical material and in the context that college professors have to spend a great amount of time writing, too. This paper will look at the kinds of information that can be imparted to undergraduates through surveys of faculty on the variety of items that require change in those graduate theses and dissertations. Surveys will also be provided to address the students’ attitudes toward being given communication suggestions from engineering faculty.