|
| January 2011 | Subscribe |
PREMIER SPONSOR |
|
In This Issue:
|
Products & Programs FROM OUR SPONSORS:
|
I. Databytes |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Head counts and Degree ProductionStudent to faculty ratios reflect various approaches and conditions at engineering colleges, including the influence of graduate programs, the size of the school, and whether the institution is public or private. Here are student/faculty ratios for bachelor's degrees awarded for 2008-09.
Other data trends can be viewed at www.asee.org/colleges.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
III. TEACHING TOOLBOX |
||
FROM CAPSTONE TO CLINICAt a design lab, engineering students gain valuable experience solving problems for medical and veterinary researchers Angelique Louie was having trouble coming up with enough project ideas for her biomedical engineering students to pursue in their capstone senior design course at the University of California, Davis. So, about three years ago, the associate professor started reaching out to veterinary and medical faculty. When she joined forces with Cristina Davis, an assistant professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering, the effort went into high gear. The pair sent out solicitations to hundreds of faculty members at the school of medicine, veterinary school of medicine, and college of biological sciences. Each recipient was asked to submit "a one-page white paper on a problem – not on how to solve it – just on the problem that they needed help with," says Davis. They hit a gold mine. Requests began to pour in for instruments that were needed but either too expensive to purchase from commercial vendors or nonexistent. Davis and Louie sorted through them to identify projects most appropriate for their five-month undergraduate senior design courses. These included such projects as the construction of a new anesthesia cart for veterinarians at the Sacramento Zoo and a specialized laryngoscope for a llama. But of the 50 to 60 requests, Louie and Davis could accommodate only a limited number within the confines of their respective capstone courses. When applicants had to be turned away, says Davis, "we kept getting these phone calls, and we felt bad because we're the ones who got the word out." The two professors realized that they had identified a pressing need for engineering help. Indeed, Davis was surprised to learn just how difficult it is for clinicians and veterinarians to test out ideas for medical devices on a university campus. "They have no road to prototype" a tool, she says. "They don't really know how to design it, either. They just know how they need it to work, but they need some engineers to get it designed right and then built." Most of the clinical and veterinary departments had some amount of funding to hire someone to work on their ideas, but not enough to outsource the work to a design firm – which can get pricey. "We realized that our campus was missing out on a lot of commercialization opportunities as well as interesting didactic instruction experiences," says Davis. And so the Design and Prototyping Clinic at UC Davis was born in early 2010. The undergraduate capstone courses still take on design projects, but applicants whose requests don't get picked up now have another option: They can hire graduate engineering students to undertake their projects, with DPC serving as "a matchmaking service." Clients submit projects through the DPC website (http://dpc.engineering.ucdavis.edu/), and Louie and Davis then match them with graduate students who possess the appropriate skills. Clients are expected to provide funding for personnel and supplies associated with the project. It isn't only the medical and veterinarian faculty who gain from the DPC. Most graduate students earn some money through fellowships or grants held by their supervisor. But in physics and mechanical and electrical engineering, the funding is often spread thin, so students have to support themselves by taking on an outside job or serving as a teaching assistant. The DPC eases their financial burden while providing graduate engineering students with the chance to learn to work with a client. Understand the Problem Tashari Elsheikh, a mechanical engineering Ph.D. candidate, was the first to be matched. The project, submitted by a veterinarian, Craig Long, was to develop a new bowel biopsy tool for cats and dogs. Current biopsies require expensive surgery that involves removing tissue for analysis. Long envisioned a tool that could snake through an animal's bowels and push the tissue close to the intestinal wall so it could be analyzed by ultrasound. "Instead of having to pay for a $1,500-to-$2,000 surgery to biopsy the bowel, it may be a $100 procedure," explains Elsheikh. Long had a design in mind, but over the course of consultations with Eksheikh and based on information the grad student gathered about similar instruments, the two men eventually settled upon what Elsheikh describes as "a simpler and more elegant design."
Long has high praise for his collaborator, who he says possesses an innovative, "MacGyver-like ability that is probably difficult to acquire in class." For his part, Elsheikh praises the process: "If Craig had gone down to the machine shop and shown the drawings to the machinist, the machinist would have just built what he had drawn," he says. "It would have cost him quite a bit of money and wouldn't have been a refined design or goal-oriented." As a teaching assistant, Elsheikh shares lessons learned from the experience with his undergrads: "The job of the engineer is to really focus in on the problem," he says. "You can't let your sponsor lead you too much in how to fix the problem, but you do need to listen to your sponsor very well and understand what the problem is." Another project, undertaken first by the undergraduate capstone students, addressed a problem experienced by cancer researchers: how to produce workable wax blocks for the study of tissue samples. Clinicians embed cancerous tissue into these blocks for easier handling and observation under microscopes. But the machines that produce the blocks cost upwards of $25,000. Most universities can only afford a few, forcing researchers to jockey for time with them. Current machines also stamp out the blocks with the tissue embedded horizontally. Researchers, however, need tissue aligned vertically, so it can be sliced thinner and produce a greater number of samples for analysis. As a result, each block has to be rotated 90 degrees manually, a tedious additional step when dealing with numerous blocks that can also introduce contaminants. During spring 2010, an undergrad mechanical engineering team took up the challenge of developing a cheaper, hand-held tool. The students produced a device the size and shape of a Sharpie pen. "It stamps out the block and also rotates it by 90 degrees," team member Mario Miranda proudly explains. "You never have to touch the block." DPC has found a sponsor to develop the tool further, and is looking for a graduate student to work on it. Part of the value of DPC comes in the real-world experience gained by students, Louie says. It's an excellent training ground because they have to "learn to communicate with MDs and DVMs to convey their ideas." Having to reach across disciplinary boundaries and manage a project that produces a product "challenges and hones their managerial skills." And, Davis adds, it gives them "another thing to talk about when they go on job interviews." For Elsheikh, the experience shows what engineers can achieve. "We mechanical engineers boil the physical world down pretty quickly," he says. "Even if it's a surgery tool for a vet or something that goes into space or underwater, it boils down to simple principles that we like to apply to everything. I learned we're a lot more capable of doing things than we sometimes think."
|
IV. JEE Selects |
|
COST OF AN ENGINEERING MAJORMust students choose between practical skills and personal growth? The demanding credit requirements of engineering may be turning away students who think that the major could limit their personal and social development. A recent study used data from the National Survey of Student Engagement to assess the undergraduate experiences of students in engineering; computer science; science, technology, and math (STM); arts and humanities; social sciences; business; and other majors. Between 2002 and 2007, nearly 12,000 students were surveyed at 240 institutions during their first year and then again as seniors. In most cases, engineering students reported results similar to other majors in overall satisfaction, hours spent in cocurricular activities, and community service/volunteer work. But there were notable exceptions. First-year students and seniors in engineering reported the highest gains in practical competence, and first-year students reported the highest mean on higher-order thinking. But first-year and senior students reported the lowest gains in general education. Seniors in engineering reported the lowest mean on integrative learning and gains in personal and social development, and reflective learning. Engineering students were like all other majors in how they spent their time each week, including hours relaxing and socializing and time spent in volunteer/community activities. But first-year students and seniors in engineering spent considerably more time preparing for class compared with other majors, and less time working off campus for pay. Differences between engineering majors and others can be explained programmatically. Engineers typically have the highest number of credit requirements compared to others, which may preclude involvement in activities that foster reflection and personal growth, including independent study and study abroad. We believe that the demanding curriculum forces engineering students to choose during college between acquiring practical and marketable skills and participating in educationally enriching experiences. We found evidence that this might be the case when we compared students who persisted in engineering all four years with students who left engineering and students who migrated into engineering from other majors. First-year and senior engineering persisters spent significantly more time preparing for class and significantly less time caring for dependents compared with non-persisters and migrants. Seniors who persisted reported the most frequent participation in co-op/field experiences, while non-persisters reflect significantly more foreign language coursework and independent/self-designed majors than engineering persisters and those who migrated into engineering. Migrators rated their reflective learning significantly higher than did engineering persisters. Two factors predicted engineering persistence among seniors: gains in practical competence and hours per week preparing for class. Predictors of non-persistence included gender (women were 35 percent less likely to persist in engineering), gains in general education, reflective learning, and hours spent working off campus. We wonder whether students who leave engineering – and maybe even those who never enroll who might otherwise have considered the degree – enter other majors believing they can still acquire the practical skills that make engineering so appealing, while giving themselves curricular breathing room for activities that are difficult or impossible to pursue when enrolled in engineering. Serious consideration of these questions calls for a reconceptualization of engineering programs. Some schools have moved in this direction: Carnegie Mellon reduced major requirements, and the University of Arizona created a B.A. in engineering. But "reconceptualizing" cannot mean making shortcuts to the engineering degree. Engineering faculty and deans should identify the fit between undergraduate curriculum and required professional knowledge, and create a more efficient degree. Academic leaders ought to be able to create engineering curricula that strike a balance between technical sophistication and personal development. Gary Lichtenstein is consulting professor of engineering at Stanford University and principal of Quality Evaluation Designs; Alex McCormick is a faculty member of education leadership and policy studies at Indiana University; Sheri D. Sheppard is an associate vice provost for graduate education and professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University; and Jini Puma is a research associate at the University of Colorado Denver. This article was excerpted from "Comparing the Undergraduate Experience of Engineers to All Other Majors: Significant Differences Are Programmatic," in the October 2010 Journal of Engineering Education. . |
V. JOBS, JOBS, JOBS |
Job-hunting? Here are a few current openings:1. Biochemical Engineering -- 1 opportunity 2. Biomedical Engineering -- 1 opportunity 3. Electrical Engineering -- 3 opportunities 4. Industrial Engineering -- 1 opportunity Visit here for details:
|
VI. COMMUNITY ANNOUNCEMENTS |
Free Webinar for ASEE Members
|
VII. COMING ATTRACTIONS |
Upcoming in February's Prism MagazineFebruary's Prism is a special issue featuring highlights of K-12 STEM education programs around the world – in France, Finland, Japan, China, South Africa, Canada, Israel, and Brazil. Two noteworthy examples in the United States are featured: teachengineering.org, launched at the University of Colorado; and Massachusetts' engineering curriculum. In some countries, the programs are innovative—in South Africa, cellphones are a tutoring platform; in Brazil, a neuro-science center has an expanding K-12 science education program. But Japan has found educational value in the abacus. The issue also has a feature on Vancouver, BC, site of ASEE's annual conference in June.
|
VIII. SOUND OFF! |
Do you have a comment or suggestion for Connections? Please let us know. Email us at: connections@asee.org. Thanks.
|
To unsubscribe from this newsletter, please reply to connections@asee.org with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line - please include the email address that you would like removed from the mailing list. This Newsletter was sent to you by: American Society for Engineering Education Managing Editor: Tom Grose |