 My great pleasure to introduce the distinguished lecture today, and this is the grand finale for the Purdue Engineering Distinguished Lecturer Series this academic year. This is the eighth distinguished lecture this year, and we have had fantastic speakers throughout the year in different views. And today is very special because finally we get to talk about the people factor. And as Donna mentioned, that today's speaker holds a special place in the world of engineering education. She is the Richa Wayland Professor of Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, where I had spent some time as a student. And her impact is felt in industry, academia, and also nonprofit world. I think that she had her PhD from Michigan here in the Midwest. We'll have to be careful with that. But at least it's. Yes. Well, we welcome her back to the Midwest. And she worked in Detroit with the three big automakers. And then she also spent a lot of time with the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching. And over there, she initiated multiple major national centers in the field of engineering education. Then she also served in multiple roles at Stanford, including, I think, associate chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the associate vice provost for graduate education, and then also the chair of the Faculty Senate at Stanford. Her impact is felt both in scholarship and across society. She is the force behind multiple major national initiatives. And she also has been recognized with multiple awards, including two top awards in ASWE. Now there's one particular award that I know very well is extremely competitive and prestigious, the Gorsuch Award for Teaching at Stanford. It is the highest award for teaching excellence at Stanford. And I know that only the very best teacher in the world stand a chance to compete for that. And our speaker here today received that a few years ago. So it's such a great pleasure to welcome Sherry Shepherd from Stanford to talk about something very timely and important, and may I say, holds a special place in terms of excellence and history here with great pride and heritage in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue. So thank you so much, Sherry, for visiting us. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Great. I do feel like I'm coming back home being in the Midwest. My roots are in Wisconsin. As well as in Southeast Missouri, if I say the name correct. So it's good to be back here. I have to admit, right now I'm a little bit envious of all of you. You're at the end of your school year. We just entered week five, and we have five more weeks ahead of us, so our term, we're on the quarter system, goes until the middle of June. I have to say, where it switches for me has come the end of August and September, when all of you are heading back to school. We're just, you know, ramping up for the new school year. So congratulations on almost being done with a new academic year. So you've been working a little bit on your assignment. If you don't have your five adjectives, or three adjectives, if you could write those down, it would be great. And then we'll go on to the next thing we're going to do with that worksheet. Who has three adjectives? OK. Great. OK. So what I'd like you to do next is more quantitative. So I'd like you to turn to the person next to you, and you've got a scale that goes from 0 to 100. And as engineers, we like numbers. And this is the cohesiveness and consistency scale. So I'd like you to compare sketches and adjectives. And on a scale of 0 to 100, kind of say, are you consistent with one another? That would be 100. Or you're totally inconsistent, that's 0. Or is there elements that are consistent and elements that are not, which would put you kind of in the middle? So turn to the person next to you and figure out what your scale should be. Ah, OK. Great. That's perfect. Thank you. That's very helpful. Yeah. Perfect. Thanks. OK, thank you. And you could join them too? Yes, I was going to, but I'm thinking of my average. OK, OK. This is my set. OK, that's why I'm here. I was trying to think of a word that describes somebody who thinks about users of. So that's 50-50, 2 for 4, 1 half. Yeah, OK, so you're a 50% group. So who has an alignment score who's still working on it? OK, if you can take about 30 more seconds to figure out where your X is on that 0 to 100 scale, that would be great. Their partner are in the 90 to 100 range. Anyone? Nobody, OK. Who is in the 40 to 60 range? OK, so let me call on a few people. The two people in the back, what did you agree on and what was different in your visions? OK? OK. And then what did you disagree on? And what were your pictures of? OK, that's OK. The assignment could go on. OK, somebody else who was in the 40 to 60 range. Come on, don't be afraid to raise your hand now that you know. OK. So anybody else have a gender to their person? Anybody else? Yeah, OK. So gender might be there. Did anyone have somebody who might be in a wheelchair? OK, OK, great. And anybody in the 0 to 30 range? Yes, OK. What were you disagreeing about it? Yeah? Yeah. OK, great. Good. So thank you. This was a warm-up exercise, really, to have us all recognize that this thing, what is an engineer, who is an engineer, is a really complex problem. There's no single answer. And in your drawing, were you drawing yourself? Were you drawing the image that you want to attain? I mean, there's a lot of ambiguity in this whole assignment. And I would say, this actually assignment really is suggested by the draw an engineer test. So I didn't create this kind of the maybe some of the new elements are starting to be those adjectives. And I've been using the idea of descriptors with my students. So this is a word cloud from 80 sophomores that I taught in the fall in a strength and materials class. And I asked them to come up with five words used to describe engineers, because I wanted to understand what they were bringing into the classroom in terms of their images. And some of those are really great, innovative, curious, logical, persistent, intelligence, dedicated, precise, open-minded, thorough. I also like to look at the words that only a few people answered, because that also says that there are edgier pictures of what engineers could be. And some people talked about us being adept, adventurous, calculated, calm, clear, clever, artistic. OK, that's a good one. But again, that was only said by a very few of the people. I also asked them five adjectives they would use that would not describe engineers. And I didn't give you that assignment, but you could think about that. Any idea what the biggest word was, most often, that we are not? Social? OK. We're not dumb? OK, anything else? OK, you're going to be surprised. We're not lazy, which is a really interesting idea that sophomores are thinking that's something that we aren't in terms of maybe the work habits, the course load. I think one could tease out, why is it that lazy ends up being the dominant one? We're not selfish, we're not unimaginative. Now again, some of the ones that came up that you would not use to describe an engineer, to me are troubling too. We wouldn't be called fun. We wouldn't be called loved. We wouldn't be called sympathetic. We wouldn't be called thoughtful, or well-versed, or whimsical. And so if those are some of your images of what could you could bring to engineering, and you feel like that that's not part of the canon, what does that say in terms of your joining the engineering team, if you will? So this is all really a warm-up to a question that nags me, puzzles me, baffles me, and has intrigued me for a long time, that simple question, how do we make a better engineer? And even that question has a lot of parts to it. So what does better mean? The wonderful group of graduate students I talked with, talked about have we realized the engineer of 2020 report, now that we're at that year. Does that define what a better engineer is? Is it a better engineer, one that's more socially rounded, that's more sympathetic? I mean that, we could spend a long time saying, what is better? What's an engineer? Is that someone with a degree? Is that someone with an image of themselves? Is that somebody who has a job role that says engineer? So even that is a puzzlement of what do you say an engineer is? What does it mean to make an engineer? I use that word intentionally, but is that to educate, to foster, to initiate? We could look at a whole set of words on what's involved in, I've also assumed there's a transition from not being an engineer to being an engineer if we're making something. Who's the we? So is that parents? Is that K through 12 teachers? Is that higher ed teachers? Is that the individual themselves? Is that society as a whole? Is it journalists? Who's the we that's involved in this endeavor of making a better engineer? And then how do, makes an assumption that's kind of engineering like. It's saying, how do we go about doing this? Should we even make better engineers? Should we invest nationally or internationally in that question? And then A, so the question is even posed around a singular individual. And really is it a set of engineers that are endeavoring to do things? So you can see why I sometimes have nightmares or dreams or think a lot about this seemingly simple question and where my work or our work collectively could actually advance our understanding of what engineering is and who's at the table. So I'd like to share with you five ideas that have informed my thinking about the question. And let's start with idea number five. So you know this is the idea that engineering enables many possibilities. So I've got a number up there, 3.9 million. And I have a quiz for you. So is that the number of babies born in the US in 2017? Is that the number of individuals in the US with a US engineering BS degree? Or is that the weight in newtons of 230 average automobiles on earth? Okay, who thinks it's A? Okay, who thinks it's B? Who thinks it's C? Okay, who thinks I was not a very fair person because it's all of the above? Okay, so 3.9 million is approximately the number of individuals with a bachelor's degree of some form in the United States. And that's about 1% of the population of the US. And that becomes really a very sobering number when you recognize how rare engineers are and how possible it is that kids in growing up may have never met an engineer, much less having had a conversation about what the work is. So this really sparks our imagination of how can we give more interactions or sponsor more interactions between engineers and the more general public and K through 12 students. So in terms of thinking about the pathways of those engineers or the people with an engineering degree, it's also interesting to look at how many of them go on to get master's degrees. So about 20% of them go on for masters. What you also see is about 17% of them choose masters or graduate programs in other things other than engineering. So it might be an MBA, it might be a medical degree, it might be a law degree, so other things. And actually that's a healthy flow, if you will, as well. What you also notice are those two other little pathways into that master's. And some of them are people with non-engineering bachelor's degree. And that's also an interesting recognition that to do graduate work in engineering does not mean that you have been on the engineering train all along. And then also there's this interesting group that had no bachelor's degrees that go on and do graduate work. And so what's happening and who are those individuals in terms of their pathways? And then we've got a smaller group, 3.6% of that original 3.9 million individuals that go on for engineering PhD. Some of you are in this room, you know. And some of you don't have engineering undergraduate degrees and some of you do. So this is kind of a pipeline thing looking at the education. Of the 3.9 million educated engineers, 3.6 million are in the workforce. Okay, so what are some of the reasons that that 300,000 aren't in the workforce or aren't counted by the US Department of Labor? Yes. They've retired, yes, okay. Other things that maybe aren't in for pay. They're doing volunteer work, okay. Other reasons people might not work for a while. They're unemployed, okay. They might, yes. They could be going back for a graduate degree so they would be out of the workforce in the official. Now they'd be counted probably if they had an RA kind of thing that it gets complicated of who you count as being in the workforce or not. Other things people might do. They could be a parent or they could be taking care of their parents. So there could be family reasons why they could be sick. So there's lots of reasons to understand why people might choose or be forced to not be in the workforce. Or they could have done a startup and be retired at 35. Who knows what their stories are, but they're an incredible interesting set of stories I'm sure to be found on why there's that difference between the educated and in the workforce. So we've got this 3.6 million. Now the question for you is how many of, what percentage of those people in the workforce are actually working as engineers? How many of you think it's 80 to 100%? And any answer is fine, because you're a wag. Okay, okay. 50 to 80%, okay. Less than 50%. Okay. So this is the number of people working as engineers. So, and the overlap between the number working as engineers and the number educated as engineers is 35%. That means of that 3.6 million people who got bachelors in engineering, 35% of them are working as engineers. This is also interesting because it shows us with that blue that's outside of the green circle is there are people working as engineers and the US Department of Labor has an official definition of what is engineering work and what is not engineering work are doing this engineering thing without an engineering degree. In some cases, they have no degree and they've worked in an environment and in a field for a long time and built up their tacit knowledge and are very expert in that. In other cases, they may have been a physics major, they may have been an English major and they make a transition to actually working as engineers. So this is interesting from multiple standpoints, you know, how do those individuals without the engineering degree get to be engineers? What are their pathway stories? And then what's the story of all these individuals who've invested in an engineering degree that aren't working as engineers? Is that a loss or is that something to celebrate because in fact that degree opens up a number of possibilities? All questions that could be searched and should be searched and understanding who engineers are and what their pathways are. Okay, this is another really interesting picture of that 3.6 million. So this is an interactive visual on the US Department of Labor's website and it's interactive in that you can highlight, for instance, you can highlight engineering and it will show you all the places that engineers go in terms of their employment. So if I was interested in those people who'd gotten psychology undergraduate degrees, I could see where they go in terms of their work. I could also play it backwards. I could say we've got all these managers of non-STEM, what were the feeding into those positions from the various degrees. You can also play with this in terms of gender so you can look at the patterns for women and for men if you're going with the gender binary. And you know, I put this up here because it really emphasizes there's lots of pathways and lots of possibilities in terms of an engineering degree and I also really challenge all of us to think about what is the visualization of the data that we're gathering. As we gather big data sets, how do we make it accessible to a broader range of people to ponder things and ask questions about pathways? Now, I do want to talk a little bit more about this 35% because there's other data that help us understand that. So this was a study that looked at people's occupation in 2003 and these were individuals that had gotten their engineering degree between 1996 and 2002. So it was a snapshot from 2003 what they were working in in terms of engineering, computing, engineering related roles, management, other science and engineering, non-science and engineering and not employed and what they were doing in 2008. So over that five-year window what happened to them in terms of did they stay in engineering and where did they move into other things? So what we find is that roughly 75% of those that were working in engineering at 2003 are still working in engineering five years later. So that looks like fairly good persistence. We also see that those in 2003 that started out in management associated with engineering, about 23% of them migrated back into engineering. So recognizing someone may start in a non-engineering role and then migrate back into engineering. It's also interesting that looking at over a quarter of those that were not employed at 2003 actually migrated to engineering five years later. It's also, if we read this across a row we can see there is a diaspora of engineers. So from the 2003 while the bulk of them, three quarters of them were still in engineering some of them migrated into these other professions. And I show this because that other picture of the 35% seems so stark and it doesn't really acknowledge that one has a career that happens over a number of years and the 35% number represents those who just graduated with a BS in engineering degree and those who are 80 years old. And so being careful not to over generalize and saying, oh, everybody's walking away from engineering on the day they graduate or the bulk of them there. Most of them are still actually going into engineering as their first job. This is another thing about the engineering workforce that I ponder a lot is representation. And as of 2015, 14.5% of all practicing engineers in the US are women. On the number has been slowly creeping up, but very slowly. And in my own field in mechanical engineering, it's the lowest representation of women of any field that's 8.6%. In the background on this slide, you see the messier table on which this was pulled from. And if you looked at the table, the one thing that isn't there that increasingly informs or should inform thinking is intersectionality. So the data that was represented in the back figure doesn't look at the combination of gender and race. And what does that say in terms of the unique experiences of individuals? But I think we are making inroads by having those classifications, but we still have things to ponder on why these numbers are relatively low. So that was kind of a dim sum or a data sample from a brand new report, now so new, that came out in December called Understanding the Educational and Career Pathways of Engineers. It's available free. The National Academy of Engineering. The National Academy of Engineering is a foundation in Washington, DC that does several things, including honoring people who've made major contributions to engineering, but they also do studies. And these may be studies that Congress would like to see done on a particular technical issue or studies like this, which is really around what is the health of the engineering workforce in the United States. And I happen to be on the author team of this report. So highly recommended in terms of looking at lots of data tables and information, which I just showed you a few of them. I was primary co-author of chapter three in the volume. And this chapter I'm actually proud of and happy with because it really looked at the social science of people being in engineering and what attracts them and what sustains them in engineering and what sustains them in the workforce. And this is the social cognitive career theory that really talks about how people inputs and learning experiences ultimately map into goals around staying in engineering. And so we use that as a window into the various stages an individual would go through in persisting. And I really wanna shout out to my primary co-authors, Nadia Fuat, who's at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and Amy, Jester Nick Will, who's at the University of Colorado, who were terrific co-authors. And I wanna flag Nadia's other work. So she has an incredible study out called Stemming the Tide that looks at women engineering graduates and what their career paths are a few years out and longer term. It's actually a very influential national study on that question. And then Amy's work has largely focused on the question of how does service learning and working in international scenes translate into career goals? And what are the kinds of places that individuals who have chosen to have a significant component of service learning in their graduate or undergraduate studies, how does that translate into where they had career wise? So really good work to think about. I also wanna flag some of the cool appendices. Let's see the cobweb model of the engineering labor market. So two of the members of this committee were economists, which were a real learning experience for me in terms of working with economists, but it's a model on does the market solve the problem? So if you say that the problem is under representation of minorities and or women, an economist might say, well, if it's a problem, the market will solve it. Our salaries will be higher and we'll attract more. We could talk about whether that works or not. And the appendix E is advancing our understanding of engineering education, pathways, employment, dynamics and economic impact through the innovative use of administrative data. So if you like data, this is also a really good place. Okay. So we could talk about implications. Instead, I'm gonna actually give you a choice on where we head now for this talk. So you've heard the design near adventure thing. We have four different paths we could go through now on where I head with this talk. And I wanna tell you what those are and you're gonna vote and that will tell me where to head. Okay. So that'll also let you know what the other interests are in the room. So I could talk about what is engineering work. So we've done studies that have done a dive into really looking at an ethnographic manner on what is the real work of engineers and how does that vary depending on where you are. And then what are the implications on where do you learn to do that stuff? To what extent do you learn it in school? To what extent do you learn it in the workforce? So we could talk about that. We could also talk about what things in school seem to matter. And you could say matter in terms of what way. The large focus of that would be on internships and what role they play in building self-confidence among students in a sense of agency and direction. We could also talk about the power of belonging. So what is the responsibility of faculty and an institution in making students really feel like they belong in the classroom and what are some of the practical things we might be doing to increase that sense of belonging for everyone. Or we could talk about expanding what we teach. And there I would be talking about a new course that we introduced about four years ago called Expanding Engineering Limits, Culture, Diversity, and Equity that essentially looks at who's at the engineering table, who's not at the engineering table, and how can change be driven within the academy and organizations. So tough choices. I'll pause for about 30 seconds, and then we're going to do a vote on 4, 3, 2, and 1. And I'm just going to ask you to put up fingers, like 4, 3, 2, 1. OK. So fingers up. All right. OK. So it looks like I'll start with 4. I'll start with 4. And then if there's time, I will go to 2. 4 is kind of nice because it's the next in the set. So in this study, we looked at, and this was actually an interview study, talking to early career engineers. I won't say young engineers, but early career engineers, who'd been out in the workforce for a year to two. And we were really using a critical incidence approach, which means you talk about, in interviewing someone, you ask them what happened along this line of things. And they talk. You're not asking them to analyze the situation, but you're asking them to describe what happened. And we asked them along the lines of an incidence in their work where they really felt they were being innovative. We also asked them for an incidence that was a high point for them. And we asked them for an incidence that was a low point. And then you take those transcripts, and you have them transcribed, and then you use coding to actually look at what the patterns were. And we happened to use a lens based on this transformative dimensions of adult learning as a set of codes to pull out incidents. And the five categories of stuff that was happening were action-related, so that were they talking about, I had to move those parts from here to here as part of the story. Were they talking about a cognitive dimension of their work? Like that finite element model was really biting me. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get it to converge. And I had to consider the materials. And so there was a real cognitive component. Was it contextual? They were talking about, well, we couldn't get the parts shipped because there was a strike in Detroit. And so we had to think of other ways of getting the parts there. Was it emotional? Like, whoa, I got praised for my work. Or my boss really just told me that I did that totally wrong. And so there was an emotional component. Or there was a social. I really had to get Mary persuaded to do that. And then I had coffee with her. And then we made that happen. So those were the five dimensions that we took. And you could only code things in one of those five categories. So when you look at those five categories, which one do you think was the most prevalent in their experiences on critical incidences? Who thinks it was action? We're thinking about engineers out there doing their thing. Who thinks action? Who thinks cognitive? Who thinks contextual? Who thinks emotional? And who thinks social? So there's a scattering of. Here's what we found. Well, those are definitions, but. Okay, so nearly 66% of their work was either action, getting stuff done, or social. Cognitive was next at 16%, contextual 10%, and emotional 8%. And so where I find this particularly interesting is I think a lot of our structures in terms of engineering programs are centrally, and not exclusively, in the cognitive domain. But that really is a dominant component of how and what we teach. You know, I think we're making inroads on the social, but what's interesting there is the social that's actually practiced in engineering is not the social we necessarily do in school. I mean, yes, we're having students beyond teams, but you tend to actually be face to face for long hours together as you're eating pizza and you're moving a design project forward. But the social we saw there was much more little sound bites and email messages that you would share with one another and the persuasion and the negotiation of people at a level of hierarchies in an organization. So it's a lot more complex. Okay, so we've also looked at where do you learn the stuff that you need to be practicing? Engineering and a teeter-totter. And so what we found there is stuff that's learned mainly in school, stuff that's learned mainly on the job and learned in both. And what we find, again, based on interviews, this was an interview of 100 engineers in four different organizations, is that learning in school was problem solving, content knowledge, and modeling and analysis. So it's really good to know that some of the dominant things that engineers say they do are learned in school. Project management skills and software skills are a little bit more on the school side. And here's some of the things we see mainly on the job, time management, communication skills, working with people, info-finding skills, equipment and processing skills that are particular to a company. We also saw these being reported only on the job. Organizational skills, context skills, and this is the one that bothers me, work ethic. So for me, that's a major disconnect on why isn't the work ethic we hope that we're helping foster in the academy the same as or complementary to what's in the workforce. So we could talk about lots of implications for that and how are we doing on time, Maria? Okay, I still, so any questions on that one? I'll jump to actually, was it number two I said I would also do? Okay, so I'm gonna go to the power of belonging. So I'm gonna flash through those. Okay, belonging and this is from Jeff Cohen and Greg Walton who are two faculty members at Stanford in the Graduate School of Education. And they define belonging as the perception of being accepted, valued and included. Belonging can help learning by increasing effort and decreasing negative, destructive thoughts. And so we as an institution have really been working with this concept both with undergraduates and PhD students and how can you increase the sense of belonging of PhD students. And we have now purses our provost and the Dean. She sent this memo out back in 2016 and she was really challenging us as faculty in the graduates in the School of Engineering to what are we doing to ensure that the Stanford engineering environment and educational experience is as inclusive and welcoming as possible for all of our students regardless of their backgrounds and our identity. And so we launched that school year with kind of this challenge or opportunity from our then at the time Dean. This concept of belonging is also making its presence in I will call more like teaching manuals. I don't know if any of you have seen the ABC's of teaching book. The first author, Dan Schwartz, is the Dean of our Graduate School of Education. And if you look at it, letter B is actually, B is for belonging. And so they talk about belonging. I wanna show a little bit of a video about this idea of belonging. And it's important in terms of our working with all engineers and all students. But in particular, I think we're being challenged around the sense of, let's see, finding the right thing to press. With first gen low income students. And so more energy around helping faculty understand what does it mean to be more open in working with students. And this is a video, and I'm not gonna play all seven minutes of it. I'm just gonna play a little bit of a teaser. We're a group of a first gen and we call them fly students or they actually call themselves fly first generation low income students produced as a message back to us as faculty on what some of the range of their experiences were and then what we as faculty could do to increase their sense of belonging. So let's play. When people are thinking of Stanford students, they don't think of us. In my family, I am the first one to attend college. Growing up, it was a really big emphasis in my family for my three siblings and I to do as well as we could in school so that we could receive a better education and go beyond working class employment that my parents have been doing their entire lives. I need professors to assume that because most Stanford students come from privilege, most Stanford students come from privilege. Professors will often say things like you've probably already seen this in your AP physics course when some students high schools don't have AP classes or physics. The professor said it as a joke but it's something that's stuck with me about what are our parents paying all this money for. And I was just like, A, parents, no, not me. Paying money, no, not me. There is this talking assignment basically speaking in class and he called me out on the question, describe your bedroom back home in Spanish. And I was put on spot. I just have to take a moment because I just completely had to imagine this bedroom that I never had. When it happens from someone who's teaching here who's supposed to have a relationship with their students, it hurts because it plays into those fears that you have as a freshman of, will people notice me? Will my voice be heard? Hi. So I'll make sure you all have the link. And the next part, it really does move into some really constructive ideas that the students offer about how do you increase that sense of belonging. So I also offer that as an example of how students can influence change by saying there's a problem here and how can we be part of both showing what the problem is but also suggesting solutions. So I'll go back. I want to go here. Let's see. From current slide. Okay. Let's see. A few more things. So a couple of ideas about how we as teachers can think about increasing the sense of belonging. It comes down to in part from me who my teaching team is and really looking at the TAs or course assistants as being part of that larger picture of how can engineers be and how they can think. And this happens to be my teaching team from introduction to solid mechanics, statics and strength and materials courses. We do some intentional activities in a class and I know 80 sounds small here but for us at Stanford that is a large class. How can you include some exercises where students are actually getting to meet one another. We also do some interesting things of taking a large classroom and dividing into pods. And so spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs. So a quarter of the class actually sits together and knows one another more and there's a TA that's assigned to that group to really say it matters that you're here today and how did that exam go and really add those additional personal elements to the class. We also do a lot of hands on. I've given up in this class thinking that the lab is a separate thing you do somewhere else. If this was the classroom, we've designed labs that where we bring the stuff in and so all 80 students are doing the lab at the same time. It does as an instructor, mean you get used to a little more chaos because the noise level and is everybody keeping pace and we've introduced more projects so that students can more intentionally see the connections to the real world and working as teams. So I think there are a number of strategies one can bring in terms of the power of belonging. So with that I think, and the whole complete slide set will be there, I think I wanna do one last thing. So the we is a really important thing because the we is everybody in this room in thinking about the education of engineers and you may have your own ideas in terms of how to advance that idea of the better engineer. And I really want to acknowledge both what's going on here at Purdue and other places in terms of helping nurture an even more thoughtful set of future faculty. You may know about the engineer education pioneers website that Cindy Atman put up but I think we actually need to add another chapter to that. Who are the new pioneers? I happen to be one of the older pioneers. The NSF is supporting more for research and practice grants on engineering education. There are departments, our schools like all of you so you should be applauded and journals and other things. So I think there is a team that is dealing with all of this. So how might our images be expanded? And with that, let's talk. Yeah, so we'll be running mics around. So if you have a question, be sure that you ask it into the mic so it gets. Hi. What are the trends in K through 12 level in engineering education? Okay, well in some ways you have people, well in many ways you have experts in this room that know much more about that. I would say in some ways it's state dependent because states really do establish a framework and whether engineering is part of that framework for K through 12. My understanding is Indiana has recently adopted an engineering framework. Boston or in the Massachusetts has had one for a number of years. I think it does have some interesting challenges in thinking about what is engineering in K through 12? Is it becoming comfortable with computers? Is it becoming comfortable in making things in your imagination? So I think there's really healthy conversations around that. And is the goal of that more engineers or more people having an awareness of what engineering skills are that they might bring into their work? So I think we're making great inroads in developing curriculum and helping teachers learn what it is, but I think there's still a lot of research in terms of particulars. Thank you, nice talk. What is the impact of the work that the group called Fly, FLI is doing? How is it impacting faculty? I know you're doing some things, but what about the general faculty on campus? How are they responding to these needs expressed by the students? I think, and I showed that complete video to the group that I'm in and all the staff were there. And it was interesting, the reaction was many of us had tears running down our faces because realizing how little things you say might be incredibly hurtful to others. What was interesting, we were engineers though, we kind of said, what can we do that's better? And one of the recognitions was the cost of classes. And so a lot of engineering classes, you're making stuff. There's material involved and who is paying for that and how does your ability to pay limit what you're able to do? So now we're working with the Bursar and the Registrar to really figure out how can students get easier access to funds and how can we make our projects less expensive? So I think there's actions on that. Our Center for Teaching and Learning has also developed a set of strategies for use in the classroom. I think there's like 21 ideas for having a more inclusive classroom, particularly around first gen. So in some ways I wish I could say that the provost could say make it better, but that's not how universities work. So it's the Center for Teaching and Learning and all of those individuals slowly working with faculty and showing the video. So I'm curious, is there any here at Purdue some organization that's thinking about first gen students? Okay. Okay. Hey, good. There's a question up there. Hi, so I'm doing research with first generation college students as well and one of my participants, she was already an industry. She was halfway through her program at Aerospace. She got a job as an intern or a co-op actually at an Aerospace company and she was there for about a year. She realized that that's not what she wanted to do. Like she didn't want to be an engineer. And but from my understanding that she didn't want to be the engineer she saw in her company, but not really the engineer that she imagined herself to be. So how, I don't know, I don't know what to do with that. Like how do we move forward and how do we get students to see that like these companies are not the only defining features of engineers, but technically that is where they go into, I don't know. Well, and there are a range of kind of companies and organizations. And so for me, we have another project that's looking at just the school to work transition and the use of the career center and how should internships play in a role in that? And so for me, a question is how can we help students try on organizations to get better insight of what is the culture? And is it a culture that they can imagine being in? Because it's too bad that one might make a decision based on one experience. Nice talk. So you asked me a very tough question during my PhD defense. So this is my chance to ask you one. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Retaliation, eh? No, that's a joke. But there's a lot of reason for what we call the skills gap in the manufacturing industry, for example, and many other industries which are sort of complaining that many of their incoming workforce, which is coming directly from K through 12, is not prepared for it. And if you go to these different companies, they have various levels of skills. But yet the education and content in K through 12 is still the traditional STEM curriculum. Perhaps it's a different kind of STEM that needs to be put in place to prepare them for doing these skilled job in these industries. Do you have any suggestions or thoughts towards this big gap there? That is such a philosophical and political question. So if you look at the German educational system, and I've spent actually a fair amount of time working in Germany, they traditionally have had two routes in high school. One is the university route. So you're being prepared, Gennasium and take the Abitur, which is a test to get into university. And then there's another path that really is getting you prepared for a trade. And that's been well respected traditionally. I think it's kind of fallen away because I think there too there is this belief that the college education is the standard that everybody should achieve. So the philosophical is, do we want to track people early into PAS? Or do we actually recognize that people develop at different stages and rates and you don't want to shut off any options? So I don't have an answer, but I think in some ways states and communities actually need to struggle with that question. There's probably words other than tracking. Yeah, did you have a comment that looked like? On that? One second. Oh, okay. So it's about possibilities and it's quite interesting. So how you show that engineering creates possibilities and but those set of possibilities also sort of underwritten by this political larger context that we function within and therefore, so it begs the question, shouldn't we, the V that you are using also start to worry about that, right? So it means that these conversations that are about policy level conversations are sort of at the heart of the issue or at least very critical. So that's sort of what I was thinking about and I was wondering, yeah, so do you agree with that? And can you say, I want to know what I'm agreeing to or not. So in a sense that so as we care about education of engineers or what constitutes an engineering work, we have to, we are by implication, at least thinking about a political question. So therefore activism in that sense is inseparable from engineering education work. Yeah, I would say, and I would also say that engineers tend to not be that political in some ways. I mean, if you look at the presence of engineers in Congress, we're not very there and that actually bothers me why we're not more because we do have some good thinking skills in that. You know, I do see, and this is kind of anecdotal, some of the women's students really want more than their technical education. So they're involved in a lot of extracurricular things in terms of moving an agenda or a set of agendas. You know, I would say if we didn't, I didn't play the clip in the fly, but we're also recognizing those students have a stress in terms of choosing a major of the fly students that is kind of orthogonal to a lot of the Stanford philosophy. So when you're admitted to Stanford, you can choose any major. There's no required GPAs or anything. And so we really say to students, explore. You know, if you're interested in French literature, think about majoring in that or whatever. The quote from this student is really talking about is he does not have that freedom because he feels an obligation to community to know that when he finishes in four years, there's going to be a good paying stable job. So I think those, the wider range of individuals at the engineering table are actually gonna push us to ask deeper questions. More questions? Someone has a question and is afraid to ask it. Andrew. Thanks for your talk. This is a very generic, like very generic kind of question. So you can take this in any way you want. And so obviously you've had a very long and great career. So over the course of your career, what are some things that you've found particularly surprising? Things like some of the stuff you might kind of expect to see, but what are some things that maybe have really stuck out with you in terms of just things that you wouldn't have ever expected in the course of your research? Okay, how hard it, one thing is how hard it is to affect change. And you got to stay in the game, that a change might seem obvious to you, but there's a lot of politics and persuasion to actually affect change. So they're not quick fixes. Another thing is how engineers are conundrum to me. I am one, or I try to be one. Sometimes I have imposter syndrome too. But as engineers, we like data and numbers. And I'll have colleagues that make arguments based on models, physical models, and then you'll ask them about their teaching and what their strategy is. And there it's kind of seed of the pants. And so we've got this conundrum of wanting hard data and collecting data, but in other parts of our lives, we're okay with just more opinion of things. So I've learned to work with that, and I still have, and I have some of those dilemmas too. I would say another thing is just, and this is, I keep seeing it again, how hard learning is, and recognizing again, there's no easy fix, and how miraculous it is when you watch somebody learn to command something. I mean, that's still just, that there's puzzlement there, they're working hard at it, and then those light bulbs that go off is still is what keeps me in the game, yeah. All right, that's a nice, oh, is there someone else? No, one more question. Yeah. Thank you so much. My question is more on a global scale. I was wondering, I mean, especially that CESA you showed based on the skills that students learn in school and in the practice. I was wondering, have we looked outside the U.S. to adopt, I mean good practices, or have you compared this CESA across? I haven't compared the CESA. I mean, that's a really good question, and that's future research. The one thing I have been, so I'm involved with a center called Unternehmertum, that's part of the Technical University of Munich, and Unternehmertum in German means entrepreneurship. And it's an interesting center that was founded by Maria Klotten, who is the founder of, or the owner of BMW, and she is, Susanna Klotten, she is worried that too many German engineers don't want to take risk and want to work for BMW. And she's worried because new ideas are about taking risk, and it's so orthogonal to the German culture about failing. And so there are some things that they're trying to import from our culture about risk taking, but you're also right in terms of looking at their work, so future research. Yeah, the comparative international thing is very cool. All right, I think that that's it. So if we can all thank Sherry. Well, thank you all for coming.