Conclusion
Having an engineering education that is focused on community is important in helping to prepare engineers today for the societal needs that they will encounter today. Over the course of this report, we have used social, political, and ethical context to discuss and explore why there needs to be greater emphasis on this type of curriculum not only at Lafayette but on a national level as well. We believed that this could be accomplished at Lafayette through more exposure for incoming engineering students by introducing a new ES 101 module that exemplifies the value of Engineering Studies and places extra emphasis on looking at technical problems through a socio-technical perspective.
Our initial research into the issues within engineering culture and discussion from earlier in the semester helped us be able to identify many of the current issues and culture problems that we aimed to address. Many of these large issues revolved around engineers losing their way and the loss of trust from the communities they attempted to serve during the 1960s and 1970s. This shifted the way engineers were viewed in society and played a large role in inspiring many groups at the time to come up with solutions to remedy these problems. This was seen on a national level as many universities began to reform their engineering curricula. This historical shift was even seen on a much smaller scale at Lafayette with the introduction of the Engineering Studies program in 1970.
Lafayette’s engineering division followed many of the current trends and paths as other engineering programs reformed across the country. The goal of introducing a Bachelor of Arts degree for engineers was to put great emphasis on non-technical skills and push for interdisciplinary studies across campus. This was intended to create engineers who saw problems through a different lens that allowed them to put greater focus on the community. And through being able to address socio-technical issues through engineering better serve their communities. Engineering education has had a shift towards ethical development. This has been evidenced by new ABET guidelines which have placed a growing emphasis on non-technical skills. This allows students to better understand the community. As noted by Professor Sanford in discussions with her, she said: “many important problems in the world are socio-technical problems that cannot be solved just by technical solutions”. It is clear that in the new world engineers will need a greater variety of skills to continue to tackle problems that they are entrusted to fix.
Unfortunately, in the current engineering culture, specialty in non-technical skills is looked down upon. Many engineers believe that being the person with the most technical knowledge and skills is the person best fit to solve the problem. This is a national problem and can also be seen at Lafayette as the Engineering Studies program is looked down upon and even referred to as “pretendgineering”. We believe one way that this problem at Lafayette can be remedied is by creating an Engineering Studies focused module to help better educate students about the importance of non-technical humanitarian engineering.
Through this course, students will engage in activities in lectures that will help them achieve a certain set out outcomes. These outcomes will not only aid them in giving them skills that will be building blocks for the rest of their engineering career but also help them better understand the importance of socio-technical engineering solutions. These outcomes which have been outlined in our curriculum proposal include understanding the engineering design process, identifying social, ethical, and economic issues, as well gaining experience in teamwork, and learning better communication skills through the mediums of presentation and a written report. This course will hopefully inspire more students to potentially join the Engineering Studies program but more importantly serve as a backbone for the other engineers to always try and consider the non-technical side of things that they will experience throughout their engineering careers.
The research and design of this course proposal would greatly benefit from further research into the engineering student body. Understanding more of what students feel like they need in their engineering education would be a great way to help improve this course and other curricula. On another note, for such a short course as an ES 101 module, the constraint of a seven-week schedule also puts restrictions on the amount of material that can be taught to the students. Double the time could be spent on different topics if the course was longer but the brevity of ES 101 is a part of what also helps make the course special. A more in-depth version of this project would be to deep dive into all the engineering curriculum at Lafayette and attempt to try and embed interdisciplinary topics throughout all the engineering majors and courses taught. Would also have been beneficial to discuss with all the various engineering departments heads many of the issues we discussed and what their thoughts on them were and how they see the future of engineering progressing in the years to come. We hope that this proposal is taken into consideration and that it will hopefully be added to the list of ES 101 modules as we believe that this course would greatly benefit the Lafayette engineering community.
This project helps show the growing demand for more holistic engineering education with a community at its center. Implementing a course like this at Lafayette is just the beginning. Much more needs to be done to continue to grow these ideals in the engineering department at Lafayette; if engineering students had an infinite amount of time available to them, adding courses that promote the ‘holistic’ engineer’s education would be a step forward in the right direction. As it stands though, the current required several classes for traditional engineers would make fitting extra humanitarian courses a time crunch on majors that already require that their students overload on classes should they come in without existing college credits or elect to not take classes over the summer and winter. Sweeping education reform at Lafayette would have to take place for the ‘holistic’ engineer to become the standard at Lafayette College instead of just a few proud EGRS majors, however, we believe that introducing engineering through the EGRS lens is a strong step in the right direction if we are to begin sparking a change on Lafayette’s campus. Getting students excited about engineering, and about Engineering Studies specifically would have nothing but positive impacts within the engineering community at Lafayette College.
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