Engineering Emotional Intelligence: Course Development And Implementation

This paper describes Engineering Emotional Intelligence (EEI), a course developed and implemented in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in Fall 2000. Part of an overall college effort to encourage the development of intrapersonal (self-knowledge) and interpersonal (ability to understand and interact successfully with others) skills among engineering undergraduate students, EEI aims to assist students to begin consciously developing their emotional intelligence, and to be more fully prepared for their professional and personal lives. One of our main goals is to help students to bring awareness of their own emotions to their life experiences, and to develop the skills to recognize and work with the emotions of others. As current research on emotional intelligence (EI) has demonstrated, EI is a significant indicator of personal and professional success. Further, both industry and academia recognize that the best engineering students will have well-developed interand intrapersonal skills in addition to their technical skills. This paper provides a brief outline of the concept of emotional intelligence, and points out the particular usefulness of this competency for engineering students. This paper elaborates upon the following overview of EEI, providing examples of assignments, activities, student work, and evaluation strategies: The course itself begins by asking students to identify their individual values and beliefs, and then to craft these into a Personal Mission Statement. The instructional team emphasizes self-awareness and personal motivations and helps students build those insights into a Personal Development Plan that is revised throughout the semester. We then work on interpersonal skills: communication, empathy, service, collaboration, conflict negotiation, constructive discontent and influence. EEI concludes by focusing on building effective teams and organizations, mentoring and coaching others, and the importance of perpetual learning—not just from courses but also from observation and reflection. This paper closes with our future plans for the course and for our continuing efforts to integrate emotional intelligence into an engineering curriculum.