Focusing On The Needs Of Engineers In Their Co Op Experiences

Co-operative education is becoming more and more common among the engineers enrolled in university programs today. Students are regularly combining their courses with work in the real world. With this real world experience, students have discovered that they can no longer simply learn technical expertise without the added knowledge of global issues, cultural constraints, and the need for communication skill. It has therefore become vitally important for programs connected with engineering to provide the necessary tools for their students to excel in the world outside the university. In regard to one of the areas of concern, engineering students involved in cooperative education activities at Michigan State University have been given an increasingly larger focus on communication skill needs in the work place. This focus along with the added emphasis on communication excellence in the classroom has provided another vital link between the academic and industrial worlds. The emphasis on communication skill and the methods used to focus awareness on these necessities are addressed in the paper. A seminar procedure is outlined, along with details of the materials provided for student helps in real world situations. Introduction. When students begin their cooperative working assignments, there are many things that are flowing through their minds. They consider the money that they will be earning as part of the work force. They are also entering, in most cases, an environment that is unfamiliar to them. They have not previously been in positions that have required them to become the supervisors of older union workers. They have not experienced jobs that have placed ultimate responsibility upon their decision-making skills. Additionally, they must communicate to many different audiences both inside and outside the working environment. Some must acclimate themselves to totally new living conditions and cultural experiences. They must also consider what they assume to be the expectations of the faculty that they will encounter when they return to the university or college setting. This may seem like a myriad of stimuli bombarding the student, but it is these items that make up the cooperative work experience for our students. In order for a work experience to be valuable for a student, there is a definite need to analyze the preparation for the experience, the experience itself and how the student moves through that experience, and the debriefing that the student receives when he or she returns to campus. A great number of the students who go on their first cooperative experience have not really been away from home that long, and it is necessary to prepare them for what they will encounter. It is also important to gain a perspective of what the student has experienced during the cooperative assignment. Therefore, well before students leave for their work sites, they must be given a clear indication of what they find out about the workplace. Since a work report is a commonly used method to obtain a grade for the semester's or quarter's work. On the other hand, the work report can be a means by which the students can focus on what is really contained in the work experience beyond the paycheck that they receive at the end of each work period. P ge 389.1 Students are hopefully trained as leaders, but they also must be treated as followers and given directions that will cause them to secure answers to questions that revolve around their experience within industry. If students are left to aimlessly wander during their work experience, they will most likely fail to see some of the important elements of working in their chosen professions during their college or university careers. They also may find that the information for which they are asked to share when they return to their respective schools may have been lost or never even thought about during their experience. It is important to lay sufficient groundwork for the students before they move into the industrial settings. They must know clearly what information they should be researching in the jobs that they are taking. This practice alone may help some to collect information in the future. One way to encourage students to look closely at their cooperative experience is for them to present them with a detailed block of information that they must investigate during the work that they will do for a particular company. Cooperative Education students who are leaving the College of Engineering at Michigan State University for their first work experience are given clear instructions on the material that they will need to gather in four distinct areas: Nature of the Work Setting, Duties and Responsibilities, Relationship to Career Goals and College Study, and Overall Evaluation. These focal points require that the students go beyond the "What I did last summer" report and delve into the operations of the companies for which they work. This concern for detail provides many students with answers that never would have surfaced under normal working conditions. Since this work experience is intended to provide valuable insight into future career paths, the depth to which students can collect information will be vital to learning. Objective. With all these things in mind, it is vital to create a means by which the student can look at the cooperative work experience and gain from the knowledge encountered in this experience. The information gathered by the student from a variety of sources, the careful preparation of the faculty for the reports that will be produced by the students, and valuable feedback mechanisms put in place to give students the faculty's response will be the catalysts that make this part of a student's education a worthwhile learning experience. Methods. This paper looks at the kinds of information that can provide students with a basis upon which to judge the value of their experience. It also provides a means by which the student can diffuse problems that may arise with faculty expectations. Also included is a feedback mechanism for faculty, which can provide students with an increased awareness of the work experience. One of the ways that we suggest to students to make the work experience both valuable and informative is to collect work related information on a regular basis before the work experience starts, during introductory sessions as the experience begins, and continuously during the cooperative work experience. Students need to start collecting information as quickly as they can through methods like the design notebook format, the information collection sheet, and the grammatical guide sheet. Anything that will provide both contents and presentation help should be utilized.