Improving the Professional Skills of Engineering Undergraduates

When engineers enter the workforce they are expected to have professional skills and the technical background. However, beside some isolated presentation and writing trainings incorporated in courses such as senior design, usually there is no official training for such professional skills in engineering curriculum. With the support from National Science Foundation, we have developed a program where students have the opportunity to receive training on professional skills and practice them in a non-threatening environment. In this program students prepare engineering related lesson plans and present them to local middle and high school students. The program offers special workshops on leadership, teamwork, presentation, personality types and learning styles. Students not only receive professional trainings on these topics they also have the opportunity to practice and reinforce these skills through the program. They work in a team of diverse students and prepare the lesson plan, practice their presentation and receive peer and faculty feedback and present to local middle and high school students and receive their feedback as well. In this paper, different aspect of the Engineering Ambassadors Program from the Engineering STAR Center, and the professional development workshops are discussed. The effectiveness of the program is evaluated. Results of the students self-assessment shows that students’ teamwork, presentation and communication skills have improved. These skills in leadership, teamwork, presentation and communication skills can be assembled in a series of professional development workshops to prepare engineering students for their profession. Introduction When engineers enter the workforce, they are expected to have professional skills and the technical background. According to the ASME vision 2030 necessary professional skills of mechanical engineers include electronic communication, interpersonal/teamwork, oral communication, written communication, and leadership among others [1]. ASCE also has a list of necessary skills on which is communication, leadership, teamwork, and attitude to name a few [2]. IEEE lists professional skills like interpersonal, teamwork, written communication, verbal communication, and leadership in their professional guideline series [3]. In AIChE’s body of knowledge, it lists necessary psychomotor skills of listening and interpreting, speaking and presenting, communication, leadership, presentation, and teamwork [4]. In general, every engineering disciple these professional skills for a successful engineer. Despite the standards set by these societies, usually in an engineering curriculum there is no formal course on professional skills. Typically, during the capstone senior design course undergraduate engineering students are exposed to some of these skills such as presentation and team work. Occasionally the center of career development at an institution will offer sessions on professional skills usually focusing on interviews and presenting yourself to a potential boss. Overall most engineers are graduating with little of the professional skills that will make them successful in the workplace. Engineering Ambassador’s Club at Manhattan College At Manhattan College, a program was created called engineering ambassadors club. The club runs on a semester long loop spending the first half of the semester preparing lesson plans on engineering topics including a hands-on activity while attending workshops to enhance members’ professional skills. The second half is then spent on perfecting, practicing, and teaching the lessons to local middle and high school students. The club is comprised of engineering and education undergraduates. One of the goals of the engineering ambassadors’ club is to provide the necessary professional skills for engineers to be successful. The professional skills which this program primarily targets are presentation, communication, leadership and teamwork skills. The ambassadors are learning and improving these skills through workshops in the first half of the semester. The skills they learned are then reinforced through developing lesson plans in interdisciplinary groups, practicing the lessons with peers and faculty, and finally presenting them to middle and high school students. All of these aspects include self, peer, faculty, and in the case of the school visits student feedback. The Ambassadors The defining feature of this engineering ambassador program is the collaboration between the School of Engineering and the School of Education at Manhattan College. Within the student body of the club there is not only a diversity of engineering major but also diversity with the education majors as shown in figure 1. Figure 1: Course of Study for Engineering Ambassadors One of the goals of the program is to encourage women to enter the engineering field. The demographics of the engineering ambassadors allows for each visit to include about half of the ambassadors to be female. In the spring of 2016 the club comprised of thirty-nine percent (9 students) females which increased in the fall of 2016 to forty-six percent (13 students) females as shown in figure 2. Comparing with the engineering school diversity of only nineteen percent female the program was successful in recruiting female students and providing female role models to middle and high school students [5]. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Electrical Engineering Mechanical Engineering Chemical Engineering Civil Engineering Computer Engineering Childhood Education Adolescent Education