Industry Immersion: The Impacts of a Sabbatical Deep-Dive

Sabbatical experiences provide an opportunity for faculty to immerse themselves in current scholarship, to explore new areas of research, and/or to pursue professional development. This paper reports on one capstone design instructor's experiences during a yearlong sabbatical in industry. The author spent six months working as part of an engineering team at one company, and then spent four months on short visits to 24 engineering companies across the country to gain an inside look into a variety of engineering disciplines, multiple approaches to engineering design, and different workplace environments. This paper shares feedback from companies regarding important skills for entrylevel employees. The paper describes how the sabbatical experience impacted the author's approach to teaching the capstone design course, and modifications the author made to the course as a result. In addition, the paper discusses the process for coordinating such short visits and recommendations for pursuing a similar sabbatical experience. Introduction Sabbatical experiences provide an opportunity for faculty to immerse themselves in current scholarship, to explore new areas of research, and/or to pursue professional development. For capstone design instructors, many of whom coordinate projects with industry sponsors, a logical option for sabbatical is to spend it in industry. This option is particularly attractive and useful for faculty members who have followed the standard academic pathway and have not previously worked as practicing engineers. The engineering literature is surprisingly sparse on faculty sabbaticals, and what literature exists focuses more on the use of sabbaticals for research endeavors, teaching opportunities, or international experiences. A few papers, however, report on faculty sabbaticals in industry, extolling their virtues for reinvigorating teaching, collecting current and relevant examples for students, connecting with current practice, and extending one’s network.14 In some cases, enterprising faculty coordinated their own industrybased sabbaticals, such as Richard Goff’s experience spending a semester at HarleyDavidson in Milwaukee.5 In other cases, institutions such as Middle Tennessee State University have implemented faculty internship programs in industry to facilitate applied professional development for their faculty.6 The author of this paper organized a multifaceted industry immersion experience for herself to expand her own knowledge and inform her teaching. Background and Motivation The author of this paper coordinates and teaches the capstone design course at Smith College, a role she has had since the first year of the course in 2003. During that time, she has worked with capstone design students on 80 projects in collaboration with more than 35 sponsoring organizations. Her academic background is in civil engineering, but she teaches engineering P ge 26957.2