PRISMJANUARY 2015

FROZEN ASSETS

CLIMATE CHANGE OPENS UP A WEALTH OF ARCTIC CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR MARINE ENGINEERS.

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June 11-13, 2015 I Seattle, Washington

PRESENTED BY

MACH• Based in the literature of change, but focused on

learning practical skills

• Features sessions on building partnerships, garnering support, and understanding institutional context

MACH received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for its 2014 workshop.

An active workshop for STEM educators who want to drive change on their campus.

FOURTH ANNUAL Making Academic Change Happen (MACH) Workshop

www.rose-hulman.edu/MACH

• Explores the processes, approaches, and abilities you need to introduce, promote, and implement innovative programs

• Provides feedback from experienced change agents in a dynamic, interactive workshop environment

MACH 2015 is sponsored by the KEEN Entrepreneurial Engineering Network.

Welcome, K-12 teachers, administrators and engineering educators from seattle and across the nation! Join us for an enlightening day of pro-fessional learning about how the K-12 education community can engage stu-dents in authentic engineering experi-ences, which emulate the processes and habits of mind as used by engineers. in so doing, you will deepen and broaden your understanding of the engineering practices as articulated within the next generation science standards.

What to expect:• results-oriented, interactive, day-long program of

professional learning for K-12 teachers• Wide array of quality sessions for elementary through high-school level

teaching• engaging, fun, hands-on activities to share with students• Ways to have students engage in engineering design processes that

enable them to improve and optimize their designs• Ways to promote engineering habits of mind and practices within lessons• increased awareness of engineering careers in today’s world• free takeaway materials for your classroom• networking and opportunities for future collaboration• certificate of completion at the end of the workshop (helpful when

applying for cpe/cpd credits)• light refreshments• attendee bags

Who should attend:• pre-college and K-12 educators in public and private education• district and state-level K-12 administrators• race-to-the-top (rttt) recipients• school counselors and administrators• informal and out-of-school time educators• engineering educators, outreach staff and advocates• anYone with an interest in high-quality engineering education

registration opens dec 5.for information about registration, go to: http://www.asee.org/K12Workshop.

registration fees early rate ends 05/30

on-site

K-12 teacher member $40 $60

K-12 teacher non-member $75 $85non-teacher member $60 $80non-teacher non-member $150 $160

©2011 National Instruments. All rights reserved. National Instruments, NI, and ni.com are trademarks of National Instruments. Other product and company names listed are trademarks or trade names of their respective companies. 01568

>> Learn how NI supports the next generation of innovation at ni.com/academic 800 991 9013

Do EngineeringNational Instruments provides the hardware and software students need to experiment, move beyond theory and simulation, and realize what it means to do engineering.

01568_ASEE Do Engineering Ad.indd 2 5/13/11 10:15:55 AMUntitled-1 1 5/19/2011 7:22:58 PM

CONTENTS FEATURES

JANUARY 2015 03

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FROM MELTING POLAR ICE TO SAVAGE STORMS, THE SHIFTING GLOBAL CLIMATE INSPIRES NEW RESEARCH – AND OPPORTUNITIES – IN NAVAL ENGINEERING. By Peter Meredith

IF ENGINEERS LIKE WHAT THEY DO, WHY DO SO MANY – INCLUDING SOME OF THE BEST – WORK OUTSIDE THE FIELD? AN ONGOING STUDY SEEKS TO UNDERSTAND THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ENGINEERING EDUCATION AND THE WORKFORCE. By Beryl Lieff Benderly

CHEAP YET SOPHISTICATED PERSONAL ROBOTS ENLIVEN AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGINEERING.By Mary Lord

SEA CHANGE

CHECKERED CAREERS

'BOT DIGGITY!

30 3535

6 FROM THE EDITOR

10 FIRST LOOK

16 DATABYTES

18 UP CLOSE OUT FROM OBSCURITY By Mark Matthews

21 REFRACTIONS READING FOR INSPIRATION By Henry Petroski

23 UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM COMMUNICATION IS SO INEFFICIENT By Mallory L. Chua

39 JEE SELECTS HOW AN EXCITED STUDENT BECAME A ‘WASHOUT’ By Matthew Meyer and Sherry Marx

40 ON THE SHELF A STRONG YET FLAWED CASE By Robin Tatu

42 ASEE TODAY YEAR OF ACTION ON DIVERSITY: WHAT WORKS? A CULTURE CHANGE By Elizabeth Holloway BOARD MEMBER PROFILE

44 CLASSIFIEDS

52 LAST WORD FRUSTRATIONS OF THE ‘FOOD COURT’ GENERATION By Jenna P. Carpenter

10

DEPARTMENTSCONTENTS

JANUARY 2015 05

39 40

NORTHERNEXPOSURE

With 2014 turning out to be one of the hottest years on record, if not the hot-

test, Peter Meredith’s cover story is timely. It looks at the impact of climate change from the standpoint of naval engineering. Despite rising sea levels, violent weather, and coastal flooding, the news is not uniformly bad. At the top of the world, a new and important sea lane is opening up as the polar ice cap melts, presenting challenges for ship designers and researchers and opportunities for students. Do we need ice-hardened containerships, more icebreakers? Imaginative Coast Guard Academy seniors are designing an “Arctic multipurpose support vessel,” capable of per-sonnel transport, cruise-ship support, pollu-

tion response, towing, and ice management. As more is learned about the consequences of climate change, it

will increasingly become an engineering story. Faced with threats to lives and livelihoods, society will look to engineers for techno-logical solutions and inventive ways to adapt. In a sense, this is familiar territory. Through the centuries, engineers have helped to brace civilization against nature’s extremes, be they storms, drought, or blight. In the process, new industries have emerged and forbidding regions have become habitable.

With a warming Arctic and other effects of climate change creating new options for engineers, this is an appropriate time for a broad look at the careers engineers pursue – and why. A National Academy of En-gineering study is doing exactly that, as Beryl Lieff Benderly explains in “Checkered Careers.” The findings may have important implications for engineering educators and employers. So too will rising discontent among millennial engineers, something Jenna Carpenter explores in Last Word. This generation wants careers that let them make a differ-ence, she writes; otherwise, some will bolt to non-engineering jobs.

Elsewhere in Prism, Mary Lord peeks into a Rice University class-room where robots have morphed into teaching tools. James McLurkin, an assistant professor of computer science, has proved that his bagel-size ’bots can be, as Lord writes, “an unabashedly fun way to convey circuits, mechanics, and other core concepts.”

We at ASEE wish Prism readers a happy and safe New Year.

MARK MATTHEWSm.matthews@asee.org

JANUARY 2015 VOL. 24 NO. 5

ASEE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Nicholas J. Altiero, PresidentJoseph J. Rencis, President-ElectKenneth F. Galloway, Immediate Past PresidentB. Grant Crawford, Vice President, Member Affairs Terri Morse, Vice President, Finance Bevlee A. Watford, First Vice President, Vice President, External Relations Louis Martin-Vega, Vice President, Institutional Councils; Chair, Engineering Deans CouncilDiane Matt, Chair, Corporate Member CouncilRandy Moses, Chair, Engineering Research CouncilKenneth Burbank, Chair, Engineering Technology CouncilMaura Jenkins Borrego, Vice President, Professional Interest CouncilsChair, Professional Interest Council IVAdrienne Minerick, Chair, Professional Interest Council IMarjan Eggermont, Chair, Professional Interest Council IISheryl Sorby, Chair, Professional Interest Council IIILea-Ann Morton, Chair, Professional Interest Council VSuzanne Keilson, Chair, Council of Sections, Zone IRuby Mawasha, Chair, Council of Sections, Zone IICharles McIntyre, Chair, Council of Sections, Zone IIIEric Wang, Chair, Council of Sections, Zone IVNorman L. Fortenberry, Executive Director

PRISMAMERICAN SOCIETY FOR ENGINEERING EDUCATION

FROM THE EDITOR

06 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

ASEE HEADQUARTERS 1818 N Street, NW, Suite 600 Washington, DC 20036 Phone: (202) 331-3500Fax: (202) 265-8504 w w w. a s e e . o rg

Norman L. Fortenberry, Executive DirectorAshok Agrawal, Managing Director, Professional ServicesPatricia M. Greenawalt, Managing Director, Member ServicesNathan Kahl, Managing Director, Communications & Society Advancement Keith Mounts, Chief Information OfficerSteven Polk, Interim CFO & Managing Director, FinanceAshok Agrawal, Director, Outreach & EngagementElisse Barnes, Associate Board Secretary & Director, Council AffairsDonna Freedman, Director, Sponsored Programs & CompliancePatricia M. Greenawalt, Director, ConferencesStephanie Harrington-Hurd, Manager of K-12 & International ActivitiesNathan Kahl, Director, CommunicationsWilliam E. Kelly, Director, External AffairsDeborah Martinez, Director, Business Development & Corporate PartnershipsMark Matthews, Editorial Director & EditorKeith Mounts, Director, Information TechnologyNicola Nittoli, Manager, Art & Production, & Art DirectorKeith Osterhage, Director, Community AffairsChristena Post, Director, Human ResourcesLisa Prandy, Director, MembershipsTim Turner, Director, Fellowships & Research OpportunitiesSandra Wingate-Bey, Director, Administrative ServicesBrian L. Yoder, Director, Assessment, Evaluation & Institutional Research

ASEE Prism (USPS 0007-481) (ISSN 1056-8077) is published eight times during the year; monthly September through February, bimonthly March-April and May-June; by the American Society for Engineering Education, 1818 N Street, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Periodicals postage paid at Washington, D.C., and additional mailing offices. SUBSCRIPTION RATES: ASEE members—$21 of membership dues apply to subscription; Nonmembers—$225 (domestic), $275 (foreign); Libraries—$225 (domestic), $275 (foreign). MANUSCRIPT SUBMISSIONS: Call the editor or send an abstract. ©2015 by the American Society for Engineering Education. PERMISSION TO REPRINT: Address requests to Publications & Marketing Services. Individual readers of this magazine, and nonprofit libraries acting for them, are freely permitted to make fair use of material in it, such as to make a single copy of an article. Statements and opinions expressed are not necessarily those of ASEE. Change of address must be received at least six weeks in advance. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to ASEE Prism, 1818 N Street, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036. Printed in the U.S.A.

The NCEES Engineering Award nationally recognizes engineering programs that promote collaboration between students and professional engineers.

NCEES invites EAC/ABET-accredited programs from all engineering disciplines to submit projects that integrate professional practice and education to compete for

GRAND PRIZE: $25,000

FIVE AWARDS: $7,500 each

2015 Competition schedule

March 16–Projects must be inprogress or completedMay 4–Entry deadlineJune 8–Winners announced

For competition details, visit ncees.org/award.

Showcase your program.Compete for the prize.

Editor MARK MATTHEWS

Art DirectorNICOLA NITTOLI

Deputy Editor MARY LORD

Assistant EditorJENNIFER POCOCKJunior Graphic Designer

FRANCIS IGOTProduction Coordinator / Junior Graphic Designer

MICHELLE BERSABAL

Senior Editorial ConsultantROBIN TATU

Chief CorrespondentTHOMAS K. GROSE (EUROPE)

ColumnistsMEL CHUA

HENRY PETROSKI

Contributing EditorsBERYL LIEFF BENDERLY

DON BOROUGHS (SOUTH AFRICA) JOSHUA BRILLIANT (ISRAEL)

CHARLES Q. CHOI LUCILLE CRAFT (JAPAN)

ALICE DANIEL PIERRE HOME-DOUGLAS (CANADA)

CYNTHIA LEITNERMARGARET LOFTUS

CHRIS PRITCHARD (AUSTRALIA)BOYCE RENSBERGER

PAUL WESTCORINNA WU

DAVID ZAX

Commercial Advertising ManagerASHLEY KRAWIEC

202-649-3838

Classified Advertising ManagerPAULA WHITLEY

202-331-3528

JANUARY 2015 VOL. 24 NO. 5

PRISMAMERICAN SOCIETY FOR ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Editorial Advisory BoardCHAIR: DEBASISH DUTTA

Provost, Purdue UniversityGILDA BARABINO

Dean, Grove School of Engineering, City College of New YorkDIANNE DONOVAN

Senior Editor, Chronicle of Higher EducationMARILYN DYRUD

Professor, Communication Department, Oregon Institute of TechnologyLYLE FEISEL

Founding Dean of Engineering, State University of New York at Binghamton; former president of ASEE

LETHA A. HAMMONEthics and Compliance Officer; Program Manager for Records Management,

DuPont Co. THOMAS W. PETERSON

Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor, University of California – Merced

PublisherNORMAN L. FORTENBERRY

ASEE is happy to provide members with a special collection of professional and personal programs we’re calling ASEE Perks.

ASEE Perks include a wide range of products and services significantly discounted for ASEE members. Your patronage of these providers helps financially support ASEE’s mission, pro-grams, and initiatives.

www.asee.org/member-resources/resources/asee-perks

FIRST LOOK BREAKTHROUGHS AND TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF TECHNOLOGY

JANUARY 2015 1110 ASEE-PRISM.ORG IMAGE COURTESY OF STEPHEN BOITANO/POLARIS/NEWSCOM

Ten years ago, a magnitude 9.1 Boxing Day tsunami cut a swath of destruction through the Indian Ocean, killing more than 227,000 people in 14 countries. Millions more were left homeless. In the days and months immediately following the disaster, local and volunteer civil and structural engineers helped solve problems ranging from inad-equate sanitation and access to potable water to constructing safe shelters with limited resources. Each area faced unique difficulties. In Indonesia, for instance, government efforts to prevent exploitation of forests meant timber had to be imported. In Sri Lanka, tens of thousands of people needed to reestablish residences further from the coast, but much of the land was studded with landmines from decades of civil conflict. Before contractors could start building, every acre had to be assessed and declared landmine-free. In the ensuing years, engineers have helped construct thousands of inexpensive, durable homes by using cheap, innovative materials such as precast, prestressed columns, precast pocket foundations and concrete door frames, and concrete walls mixed with local materials. Among restored sites is the park in front of the Mesjid Raya Baiturrahman mosque in Banda Aceh, Indonesia – shown in 2004 (left) and now. A National Academy of Engineering report found that construction quality and design allowed many mosques to withstand devastation. Their steel-reinforced concrete frames could resist loads, while domes and open arches let water surge through without causing serious damage. – Jennifer Pocock

RECOVERY LESSONSHumanitarian EnginEEring

UPLIFTING TECHNOLOGY

automotivE EnginEEring

Building ConstruCtion

Dump trucks are massive machines by design, but the latest it-eration out of Belarus has claimed the title as the world’s biggest. The BelAZ 75710, developed for open-pit mining operations by truckmaker BelAZ, weighs more than a fully loaded Airbus 380, according to the BBC, and is as long as two London double-decker buses. It can haul more than 500 metric tons, the equivalent of 350 Volkswagen Golfs. Now operating at a mine in Siberia, the behemoth is also an electric hybrid, to help cut running expenses – a big selling point in the mining industry, which faces uncertain commodity prices and rising costs. The eight-wheel, all-wheel-drive truck has two 16-cylinder diesel engines that provide elec-tricity to a generator that powers four electric motors. When not loaded, the monster machine can run on just one engine, saving fuel. BelAZ worked with Siemens to develop a truck that could carry large loads at a lower cost per ton than previous models. Though bulky, it’s also fairly peppy, with an unloaded top speed of about 39 mph. – Thomas K. Grose

Elevators were invented in 1854, and their basic engineering has not changed much since – they’re still hoisted up and down by steel cables. As engineers figure out how to build taller and taller build-ings, elevators remain a barrier to soaring architectural visions. Around 40 percent of space in today’s tallest spires houses elevator shafts, and waits can be long. Inspired by Star Trek turbolifts, German engineering firm ThyssenKrupp says it’s ready to replace cables and pulleys using maglev, or magnetic levitation technology, that enables the world’s fastest trains to hover just above their tracks. That will allow more, smaller cars to run in vertical loops from the bottom to top floors inside narrower shafts. The firm says this should reduce by half the amount of space needed for elevators while still whittling waiting times to between 15 and 30 seconds. What’s more, maglev lifts also could travel horizontally and could be designed to whisk passengers from one side of a building to another as well as from floor to floor. Will it work? Check back next year. That’s when a pilot version is slated to begin operating in a new, 787-foot tower under construction in Rottweil, Germany. But won’t an elevator that can travel sideways need a new name? – TG

JOLLY GREEN GIANT

JANUARY 2015 1312 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

FIRST LOOK

SAVVY TRAVELERstudEnt EntErprisE

Aerospace engineering doctoral student Martin Diz’s future is in the bag. Or so it would seem, given the early success of Bluesmart, his start-up that produces Bluetooth-enabled smart carry-on bags. Diz, who studies at the University at Buffalo, co-founded Bluesmart with four other students and designers. The team took their product to crowdfunding site Indiegogo hoping to raise $50,000. Instead the campaign, which closed in late November, received nearly $1.66 million from 6,273 investors. The Bluesmart suitcase features a built-in digital scale to eliminate overweight bag issues; a location tracker; a digital lock controlled by a smartphone app; a battery with three USB ports to charge a cellphone or tablet; and a data display that offers useful travel information, such as the weather forecast at one’s destination. Expected to retail for around $400, the bag is still available on Indiegogo for $280, plus shipping, with delivery in August. Diz, whose research focuses on autopilots for planes and space vehicles, may have to put his aerospace career on autopilot if Bluesmart truly rockets to success. – TG

MOM KNOWS BESTinvEntions

Each year, around 15 million babies worldwide are born prematurely or are low weight, and a million of them die, often because of inadequate medical facilities that lack incubators. The World Health Organization estimates that 75 percent of these infants could be saved if they were incubated. That problem vexed James Roberts, 22, a recent industrial-design graduate at England’s Loughborough University, who set out to invent a low-cost incubator. His creation, dubbed MOM, recently won the top James Dyson Award, an annual international engineering prize from a foundation created by Dyson, inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner. Roberts’s incubator uses ceramic heaters to keep a baby warm and is controlled by the open-source electronics platform Arduino. Its inflatable walls act like double glazing to keep the warm air intact and stable. MOM also has a phototherapy device to treat jaundiced babies. Roberts says he’ll use the $47,000 prize money to tweak and improve his prototype. Incubators used in Western hospitals can cost upwards of $25,000. Roberts estimates MOM could be manufactured, tested, and transported in flat packs for around $400. – TG

TOUCHY-FEELYultrasound

New technology out of the University of Bristol’s department of computer science could render the admonition “look but don’t touch” somewhat obsolete. Using ultrasound, the super high frequency sound waves that are best known for their use in medical imaging, the British researchers have created a device that focuses the waves on hands, and the air disturbances they create allow the user to “feel” the 3-D shape of an imaged item, as if it were floating in the air before them. They can also match a picture of the actual object being rendered to its invisible 3-D shape, so a user has the sensation of holding it. Medically, it could be used to allow surgeons to “feel” tumors that are scanned. It also has wide-ranging entertainment industry possibilities: virtual-reality games that allow players to feel the virtual world around them, holograms that are touchable, and museum displays that allow visitors to feel ancient and brittle artifacts. – TG

© BelAZ

© Bristol interaction and Graphics Group

© Dyson

Geoengineering, the use of engineering science to counter global warming from greenhouse gases, is getting more media attention. Both Newsweek and The Economist recently ran lengthy features on the subject. Newsweek’s was mainly a roundup of proposed geoengi-neering concepts. The Economist article focused on efforts by scientists to get funding for small pilot experiments. One would spray a small area of clouds with sea-salt particles to increase the water droplets in them, thus causing them to reflect more sunlight back into space. Another would use the so-called volcano effect. Sulfur spewed into the atmosphere by volcanoes can temporarily cool the Earth, so one idea calls for creating an artificial haze in the stratosphere. That might, however, deplete the ozone layer, so some researchers want to do a small experiment to assess the risks to see if they can be limited. Newsweek quotes

Stanford University environmental scientist Ken Caldeira as saying that’s probably the most workable theory, but he also tells the magazine that geoengineering is overall a bad idea because none of the proffered solutions can be tested on a large scale. That’s why many activists and scientists loathe it. They fear too many people will think there is an alternative to curbing emissions. Those doubts are also a reason that fund-ing agencies have so far not shown any indication of wanting to finance even small-scale experiments. – TG

HOT TOPICatmospHEriC rEsEarCH

© Bluesmart

BULLETPROOF LAB COATEnErgy ConsErvation

BioEnginEEring

roBotiCs

nanoEnginEEring

E-waste is a big problem, particularly in India, where a thriving IT industry produces a prodigious amount. Add what other countries dump there, and total accumulation could reach 35 tons a day, by some estimates. One partial solution could be the UrJar, a prototype power source developed by IBM Research in Bangalore that takes discarded lithium-ion batteries from landfill-bound laptops, separates out cells that still have some life, and reuses the batteries to light an LED or run a small fan. Its developers say that 70 percent of dumped batteries can provide enough energy for four hours per day of LED lighting for a year. That could be of big use in India, where 400 million people live with little or no power, including 45 percent of rural residents. In places that lack electricity, users will be able to recharge the UrJar – a pun on urja, the Hindi word for "energy" – at solar-power stations. IBM says it could build 1,000 UrJars packaged with a charger and a 3-watt LED light for about $10 each. But costs will fall if production ramps up. Ultimately, IBM seeks to give the devices away to the poorest residents in developing countries. – TG

Prosthetics have advanced dramatically. Some artificial limbs can even be controlled by human thought. But haptics remain a problem. When a real hand touches something hot, cold, hard, soft, or fragile, nerves just beneath the skin swiftly transmit that information to the brain. Artificial hands convey no such sensory information. A step toward solving that problem may have come from an artificial skin developed by researchers at South Korea’s Seoul National University and MC10, a Massachusetts company that makes stretchable, wearable electronics. The skin is made of thin layers of elastomers, or soft polymers, imbued with tight networks of sensors made from ultrathin gold and silicon that mimic nerves in the hand. That’s a neat feat because silicon is naturally brittle. To overcome that, the researchers used silicon molded into sinuous shapes that give it elasticity. The artificial skin can stretch by 20 percent. The hurdle now is figuring out how to feed the data collected by the sensors to a human nervous system. The Korean-U.S. team has demonstrated with rats that that might be possible, but more research on larger animals is needed to determine if their sensitive artificial skin actually is feeding its sense of touch to the brain. – TG

Bartenders range from dyspeptic beer slingers – think Moe in The Simpsons – to hunky mixologists like Tom Cruise in the 1988 film Cocktail. But a robot barkeep? That’s the 4,180-passenger Quantum of the Seas’ big selling point. The cruise ship features two robot mixmasters in its Bionic Bar. Created by MIT’s SENSEable City Lab from industrial robots more typically used on automotive assembly lines, the Makr Shakr robots first debuted last year at a Google conference. Now they’re permanent fixtures on the Royal Caribbean liner, which launched in November. The two bot bartenders, named N1-C and B1-C, are essentially mechanical arms. Each can produce two cocktails a minute for passengers who order their drinks via tablet computers. The New York Daily News notes that while the metal barmen won’t listen sympathetically as you pour out a sob story, they occasionally will utter corny pick-up lines or break into a dance – their movements partly choreographed by American Ballet Theater dancer Roberto Bolle. Will technology make bartenders obsolete? Perhaps. Royal Caribbean has ordered Makr Shakrs for three ships under construction. – TG

Blind people typically excel at navigating familiar places, and GPS technol-ogy can help them get around unfamiliar outdoor areas. But visiting new buildings or complexes can be daunting. A possible solution is the 3-D talk-ing map developed by researchers at the University at Buffalo’s Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access, and a company called Touch Graphics. The map, which rests on a pedestal, looks a bit like a game board with plastic buildings on it. When a visitor touches one of the miniature buildings, which are coated in conductive paint, the map’s sensors react to the finger’s pressure and the map begins giving directions and other details about the site, including its directory. A prototype of the map has been in-stalled at the Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts, made famous by Helen Keller. The maps are handy for sighted users, too. They can be fitted with an overhead projector that shoots Google Earth aerial views onto the model, helping folks remember where they’re heading. – TG

Discovered only a decade ago, the wonder material that is graphene continues to impress researchers. Sturdy, lightweight, and flexible, the honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms is the strongest material known. Now inves-tigators at Rice University have discovered another amazing attribute. Graphene is a superstar at dissipating kinetic energy – 10 times better than steel, on average. A team led by Edwin Thomas, a professor of materials science and nanoengineering, invented a laser-induced projectile impact test that uses a laser to send micro-scopic projectiles into layers of sheets of graphene at speeds close to 3 kilometers a second. That’s faster than a bullet from an AK-47. By finding out how resilient graphene is at the nano level, Thomas reckons he can project how strong it would be in macroscopic applications. His team fired the microbullets into test sheets ranging from 10 to 100 nanometers thick, or up to 300 sheets of graphene. The bullets did puncture the graphene, but the experiments showed that the kinetic energy from the bullets interacts with the graphene, which stretches and slows down the projectiles. In 3 nanoseconds before it punctures, the material distributes the stress caused by the bullet over a wide area. Thomas says this proves that controlled layering of graphene could make it an excellent candidate for body armor and protecting spacecraft. – TG

BRIGHT IDEA

FEELING GROOVY

JANUARY 2015 1514 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

FIRST LOOK

CHEERS! WAG THE DOGsEnsors

David Roberts, an assistant professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, is also an unabashed dog lover and amateur dog trainer. Which helps explain why he co-led a team that recently developed a prototype haptic harness that can better help dogs and their handlers understand each other. Roberts notes that dogs use body language as their primary means of communication, so the harness is fitted with sensors and a small computer – about the size of a pack of cards – to wirelessly send body-movement data to software that the team designed to collect and interpret the data for human understanding. The software can also translate human commands into physical ones and send them to vibrating motors in the harness that help handlers give orders to dogs beyond using hand signals and voice commands. Roberts sees the harness as a means to help better train guide dogs, military and police dogs, and dogs used for search-and-rescue efforts. The harness also measures a dog’s stress levels. Guide dogs, for instance, are trained not to show stress. But if handlers can tell when a dog is upset, they can work to relax the animal, which could help it live longer. Fido, chill! – TG

ROUTE CAUSEadaptivE tECHnology

© Dae Hyeong Kim

© Rice University

© Makr Shakrs © NC State University

© University of Buffalo

© Thinkstock

JANUARY 2015 1716 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

DATABYTES COMPILED BY AMLAN BANERJEE

55%

77%

65% 59%25% 32%

49%

9%53%

3%55%

69%

85%

75%73%51% 20%

67%4%69%

1%69%

2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8thyear

2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8thyear

This month’s graphic is based on undergraduate engineering retention and graduation data that ASEE began collecting in 2012 and represents 116 engineering schools, programs, and departments from

across the United States. Graduation percentages are cumulative. Retention percentages were calculated by taking the total

number of students who persisted in a given year and dividing it by the total number of first-time, full-time, freshmen. The annual benchmarks do not necessarily reflect the quality of an individual program, since some factors that affect student retention and graduation rates are beyond a school’s control. For example, public universities are more likely to have admission policies that require engineering programs to accept students from a geographic area who meet a minimum set of standards, while private universities can select the best-prepared applicants. Universities also have different missions and policies that can affect

student retention in aggregate.

Retention

Degree Attained

ASEE INVITES BROAD PARTICIPATION IN BUILDING A KNOWLEDGE BASE OF UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING RETENTION AND GRADUATION TRENDS. PARTICIPANTS THAT PROVIDE DATA AND PAY A FEE CAN BENCHMARK THEIR SCHOOL TO A GROUP OF SCHOOLS OF THEIR CHOOSING, AND VIEW BENCHMARKS BASED ON SCHOOL CHARACTERISTICS.FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT BRIAN YODER: B.YODER@ASEE.ORG OR (202) 331-3535.

INFOGRAPHIC BY: MICHELLE BERSABAL

Not long ago, algebraic topology was so ab-stract as to belong in “the stratosphere of

human thought,” or so Gleb Nerzhin mused in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle. Now, topologists, who study surfaces and relation-ships between proximate and global spaces, are mastering a growing number of real-world ap-plications, from preventing drone collisions to guiding six-legged robots and managing vast amounts of sensor data.

All this puts Robert Ghrist in the right place at the right time as a professor of both mathematics and electrical and systems en-gineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he and research colleagues give once obscure theories new life as power tools for the digital age.

Concepts from decades or even centuries past, like the “characteristic” named for En-lightenment mathematician Leonhard Euler, can simplify and cut the cost of solving 21st-century problems in such fields as signals processing, data aggregation, and network coding, Ghrist contends. In a vivid application of topology, his students mapped an airport’s interior space, revealing a hole-like atrium, just by using Apple laptops to capture the signal strength of various Wi-Fi hotspots. Topology also can help organize swarms of drones or figure out the behavior of nanoscale materi-als. “It’s custom-built for dealing with so many modern problems,” he says.

Just as Moore’s law predicted the exponen-tial growth of computing power, Ghrist says, we’re witnessing a comparable expansion of math knowledge and practice. In fields such as neuroscience or gene mapping, for example, math could outpace machines in hastening discoveries. “If you’re interested in protein folding, you’ll wait a long time for supercom-puters to catch up,” he asserts.

Ghrist’s work is particularly suited to sensor networks, fielding robots in uncer-tain terrain, and pursuit-and-evasion strat-egy. As such, it fits the Pentagon’s aim of

relying more on smart technology to main-tain America’s military edge. Along with di-recting other Defense Department-funded research, Ghrist led more than a dozen researchers from nine institutions in an $8 million, four-year project called Sensor To-pology and Minimal Planning (SToMP).

A mechanical engineer with a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, Ghrist, 45, has enjoyed a rapid, if frenetic, academic rise, winning a National Science Foundation CAREER grant in 2002 and a President’s Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) two years later. Following faculty appointments at Georgia Tech and the University of Illi-nois, Urbana-Champaign, he became Penn’s first Andrea Mitchell PIK University Profes-sor in 2008. Endowed by the veteran NBC correspondent and her husband, retired Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the post is a dual appointment in arts and sciences and engineering.

Part of Ghrist’s success undoubtedly comes from a compelling lecture style, which makes him a sought-after speaker at events ranging from a Technion symposium to a recent Capitol Hill presentation arranged by the American Mathematical Society. Videos in which he strides across stage, mic in hand, spreading the applied-math gospel, represent “a key step in increasing bandwidth – in math-ematics in particular,” he says. Another boon is massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Ghrist spent close to 1.5 years developing his own calculus MOOC for Coursera, complete with 15 hours of painstaking animation and the self-published FLCT: Funny Little Cal-culus Text. Some 5,000 students worldwide have completed it, including a 10-year-old American “genius” and a Mumbai teenager who went on to create videos to explain cal-culus to high school classmates.

If students could enter college having completed prerequisites from MOOCs, such as introductions to math, psychology, and

OUT FROM OBSCURITYOld math theories take on new life in engineering. By Mark Matthews

economics, they could graduate in three years and save $60,000, Ghrist contends. He also sees MOOCs that feature expert lecturers as a preferred alternative to Advanced Placement tests – at least in math. Ghrist, who says he must spend time undoing what students were taught in AP Calculus, looks aghast when told of a campaign to introduce an AP engineering course (Prism cover story, April 2014.) “Oh God – really?” he asks. The result, he fears, could be “students who are good at the AP engineering test [but] don’t know a blasted thing about engineering.”

Although America is second to none at postgraduate teaching, the nation performs less well at the precollege and undergraduate levels. One reason Ghrist, a fan of Dante and other classic authors, hopes to change that is the flashes of mathematical insight often found only in old books. “Branches of math have been lost because they were not taught well,” he laments.

Mark Matthews is editor of Prism.

UP CLOSE INNOVATORS AT WORK AND IN THE CLASSROOM

18 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

©Tom

my Leonardi/Thinkstock

20152015ASEEASEE

FORUMI N T E R N A T I O N A L

FORUMsuNdAy, juNE 14, 2015 | shERATON sEATTLE hOTEL

For additional information please contact Stephanie Harrington-Hurd at s.harrington-hurd@asee.org

http://www.asee.org/InternationalForum

Please join ASEE for the 4th Annual International Forum, where engineering professionals in academia and industry from around the globe who are engaged in novel engineering education initiatives will share information on effective mod-els, experiences, and best practices.

The theme of the 2015 ASEE International Forum is Lifelong Learning for Engineers—Global Perspectives, in recognition of the rapid and ongoing globalization of modern engineering practice and the necessity for learning at all stages.

Members of the ASEE community and their global partners are invited to submit abstracts for papers to be presented at the 2015 ASEE International Forum highlight-ing initiatives, projects, research, trends, programs and partnerships in internation-al engineering education.

Abstract submission Deadline: January 23, 2015.

Registration opens January 5, 2015.

Let ASee LeAd you into the right direction with ASee onLine memberShip.

w w w . a s e e . o r g m e m b e r s h i p @ a s e e . o r g ( 2 0 2 ) 3 3 1 - 3 5 2 0

JANUARY 2015 21

Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke. His most recent book is The House With Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship.

Photo by Catherine Petroski

READING FOR INSPIRATIONTrue-life tales that will reignite your engineering enthusiasm

REFRACTIONS BY HENRY PETROSKI

In this column a year ago, I described some books about engineers and engineering

that I had read over the previous year. Positive feedback on that column has encouraged me to describe some of my more recent reading of books by and about engineers.

The Never-Ending Chal-lenge of Engineering is a compilation by Paul E. Can-tonwine of speeches and writings of Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the legendary “Fa-ther of the Nuclear Navy.” This book, published by the American Nuclear Society, is full of insightful reflections on the engineering profes-sion and on the management of large engineering projects, with specific ex-amples drawn naturally from the nu-clear reactor development with which Rickover was so intimately involved.

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth is Col. Chris Hadfield’s memoir of going into space and what it taught him “about ingenuity, determination, and being prepared for anything.” Me-chanical engineer Hadfield was born, educated, and began his astronaut ca-reer in Canada but was assigned early on to duty at NASA by the Canadian Space Agency. Because of this, the book has a dis-tinctly American flavor. It provides consid-erable insight into the mind—and ego—of an engineer/astronaut.

Slide Rule is the autobiography of Nevil Shute Norway, who wrote under just his first two names. Norway was a British aeronautical engineer who worked on the development of airships, principally be-tween the two world wars. He has much to say about the differences between govern-ment-run projects and those carried out by private enterprise. Although the book was first published in 1954, its insights remain

fresh. Nevil Shute was also the author of On the Beach, which deals with life in the wake of a nuclear war, and other novels.

Charles H. Thornton: A Life of Elegant So-lutions is the memoir of the structural engineer of the Petronas Towers, the tallest building in the world when opened in 1996. Thornton writes about his childhood, ed-

ucation, and career in a highly personal way, providing insights into what can shape the character of a highly accomplished engineer. I found his descriptions of how he cultivated clients for the structural engineering firm of Thornton Tomasetti especially interesting and instructive.

Death of the Guilds, by sociologist El-liott A. Krause, is a revealing comparative study of how the legal, medical, engineer-ing, and academic professions evolved in four European countries and the United States from 1930 to the mid-1990s, when the book was published. Krause traces how government and industrial policies had

considerable influence on practice within the professions. The book is especially in-teresting in how it treats engineering from a sociologist’s perspective.

Ingenious, by journalist and author Jason Fagone, is, in the words of its subtitle, “a true story of invention, automotive daring, and the race to revive America.” It chronicles the ef-forts of four young teams competing for the $10 million X Prize awarded for building a vehicle capable of traveling 100 miles on the

equivalent of a single gal-lon of gasoline that also has the potential of being mass produced. The book cap-tures the personalities of team members and teams, as well as the excitement of competition among these future engineers.

Reading this selection of a half dozen widely ranging nonfiction books showed me that no matter how much the practice of engineering and the na-ture of the profession have changed over the decades and centuries, the es-sence of engineering and invention remains funda-

mentally unchanged. It is the constancy of purpose of problem solving and invention — embodied in such qualities of design and development as ingenuity, daring, boldness, and elegance of solutions — that makes en-gineering a profession full of life, inspira-tion, and sheer enjoyment.

INGENUITY, DARING, AND

ELEGANCE OF SOLUTIONS FILL

OUR PROFESSION WITH LIFE AND SHEER

ENJOYMENT.

Visit ASEE’s YouTube page for great resources:

www.youtube.com/ASociety4Engineering

Our Advanced Research Monitor series interviews engineering leaders around the D.C. region to learn what’s next for their agencies in engineering.

You will also find workshop highlights and engaging speakers from ASEE events.

Missed the annual? Our ASEE TV programming from the annual conference is available at

www.websedge.com/videos/asee_tv

videoResouRces

JANUARY 2015 23

Mel Chua, a graduate student in Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education, has a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Olin College.

COMMUNICATING IS SO INEFFICIENTLet’s not slow down the student pipeline by giving individual attention.

UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM BY MEL CHUA

After years of observing engineering edu-cation, I’ve finally figured out what our

goal is: minimal student-teacher interaction.In this model of the teaching-learning

world, human contact between faculty and undergraduates is a sign that there must be a bug in the system. Whenever we see it, it indicates an error, a flag that something has bro-ken down some-where. It requires halting the pro-duction line, which is always bad be-cause it means we produce less of... I’m not sure what, but making less of it is bad. We oper-ate under the Japanese kaizen model, where we expect all the workers – that is, teachers and students alike – to freeze the conveyor belt when they notice a defect. Ideally, we’ll reach the point where we have no defects and never have to interrupt production.

In the meantime, we – unfortunately – have to pause the conveyor belt once in a while. Did the teacher not explain a con-cept clearly? Stop the (lecture) line and ask a question! Does a student not understand the homework? Stop the line and ask a question! Did the automatic Web-based grader display an error message? Is a piece of lab equipment broken? Stop the line and call a TA for some human-contact intervention!

In an ideal engineering classroom, the factory line would hum along perpetually. Lectures, or better yet, flipped and pre-re-corded videos, would pour content into stu-dent brains. Labs would give systematized (yet individual and hands-on) learning experiences. The tedious work of human interaction would be done entirely by older students, whose time is far less valuable than

that of faculty. It’s simple arithmetic. We can scale our resources by replacing wasteful faculty-student interaction with comput-ers and graduate students. This frees faculty time for more valuable things – like depart-ment meetings and filing expense reports –

instead of being taken up by ques-tions from uneducated teenagers.

The trouble with student inter-

actions is that they’re utterly unpredictable. You can’t budget time properly for them be-cause you don’t know how long they might take, since students’ questions are so open-ended. They may even be nontechnical ques-tions, like “how do I decide what to be when I graduate?” or personal crises such as family illnesses – or worst of all, vague things like “hopes” and “dreams.” Young people. Tsk.

Under this paradigm, it’s not difficult to see why studio-style teaching has trou-ble catching on in engineering education. Projects require ongoing physical space so teams can return to work on their proj-ects throughout the day. This effectively “blocks” a studio-style classroom from be-

ing used during other “shifts.” Besides, the projects take up space that could be used to pack more bodies into your lecture hall. It’s a terrible waste of resources. Studio faculty members spend most of their time giving formative feedback on individual projects. This isn’t just time-consuming; it’s subjective and unstandardized, and therefore unfair.

Honestly, I’m not sure why this “studio” teaching model is so popular in the fine and performing arts. It produces so few young profession-als per unit teacher. It certainly can’t be a way to educate self-starters with a con-fident grasp of their unique voices. How could they develop any sort of skill, giv-en such a dearth of objective assessment? They must have come up with a better way by now. I mean, if they filmed theater class exercises, they could use facial and

voice recognition to assess performances without any need for an audience.

Wouldn’t that be better?

IT’S NOT DIFFICULT TO SEE WHY STUDIO-

STYLE TEACHING, WHICH REQUIRES

SPACE FOR PROJECTS AND TIME

FROM FACULTY, HAS TROUBLE

CATCHING ON.

JANUARY 2015 2524 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

CHANGECHANGESEASEA

From melting polar ice to savage storms, the shifting global climate inspires new research – and opportunities – in naval engineering.

BY PETER MEREDITHBY PETER MEREDITH

26 ASEE-PRISM.ORG JANUARY 2015 27

casting ice formation, ice breakup, ice floe movement – that’s a chal-lenge,” says Bruno. And it’s hard to overestimate the difficulties of operating in a hostile environment. “People know there’s ice there, but a lot of people forget that it’s dark there for six months,” cautions Bruno, noting how difficult it was to find and clean up oil in the warm, sunny Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon blowout. “Imagine doing those operations in water that is at least partially covered in ice and in the dark! Those are the kind of things that keep people awake at night.”

EYE OF THE STORM

As it happens, the Stevens Institute has firsthand knowledge of ex-treme conditions that climate change could exacerbate. Located in Hoboken, New Jersey, the school held a key card in efforts to minimize damage as Hurricane Sandy swept into New York Harbor in 2012: a robust history of graduate research in ocean observations and fore-casting, and in coastal dynamics. “We played a major role in assist-ing NOAA in their forecast of the surge” and helped Hoboken with “evacuation and preparations,” Bruno says.

Alan F. Blumberg, director of Stevens’ Center for Marine Systems, made headlines recently with suggestions for fending off the next big storm, ranging from dropping wave- or wind-powered pumps in its

path to cool the water (“The TV stations love it!” he says) to building long, slender islands off the coast to break the onslaught. “I’m all about predicting how much water’s going to come in front of your house and then trying to figure out how to reroute it,” explains Blumberg.

Another New York-area school, Webb Institute, on Long Island, has seen significant student interest in designing vessels for the Arctic. (The school offers just one program, a double major in naval architec-ture and marine engineering.) Rick Neilson, Webb’s dean, says he and another professor recently felt the need to talk a group of students out of picking an Arctic oil production platform as their third-year design project. “A production platform itself is a complex animal; combin-ing it with being in the Arctic makes it even more complex,” explains Neilson. Instead, he says, the faculty suggested building an “Arctic floatel” – a vessel that could house crews coming to work on drilling platforms, serve as a resupply base, or provide a series of functions. One plus: The students had to deal with ice loads, which are not part of the regular naval architecture curriculum. “I’ve already talked to the juniors about next semester, and they’re starting to zero in on their projects,” recounts Neilson. “One of them will be an icebreaker.”

In close competition with the Arctic for Webb students’ attention is another development affecting seaborne commerce, and one that

could undercut the allure of polar transits: the widening of the Pana-ma Canal to accommodate super-size vessels. That huge engineering project itself sits at the intersection of shipping and climate change: By eliminating the need for Asian products to traverse North America by truck or rail, the canal could con-tribute to a net reduction in green-house gas emissions. However, the droughts and storms anticipated as a result of a warming climate may affect water levels along the passage, stalling ship traffic.

For years, Webb’s senior design project has been a “Panamax” con-tainership, its dimensions tailored to fit the old canal. This year’s de-signs will fit the widened Panama Canal – “an acknowledgment that the world has changed a little bit,” says Neilson. There’s a downside, of course. The old size, says Neilson,

came with “the extra thrill of stability issues.” The new dimension “makes the stability problem less, which is not what we want. But I don’t want the students to hear me say that.”

On September 19, 2014, a 189-meter Canadian-owned cargo ship named Nunavik left Deception

Bay in northern Quebec, carrying more than 23,900 metric tons of nickel concentrate. Twenty-five days later it sailed into the Chinese port of Bayuquan after a voyage that for centuries would have seemed impossible: an unescorted transit of the fabled Northwest Passage.

The Arctic’s opening is one of the effects of climate change spurring new interest and research at several leading schools of naval engineer-ing – an interest shared by ship operators, oil companies, and cruise lines, and by national navies and coast guards. All are affected by a new Polar Code that is scheduled to take effect at the beginning of 2017. The international agreement covers everything from crew training to ship design to protecting the environment in the frigid waters sur-rounding the Poles. And those seas could become more navigable: The latest Arctic Report Card released by the National Oceanic and At-mospheric Administration last month found sea and air temperatures rising faster there than in the rest of the globe, potentially affecting global security and commerce along with the environment.

“I think our students are having conversations that are long over-due in our national policymaking circles,” says Michael S. Bruno, dean of the Schaefer School of Engineering and Science at the Stevens In-stitute of Technology, the lead institution in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Center for Maritime, Island, and Remote and Extreme Environment Security. “Do we need at least ice-hardened vessels, containerships? Do we in the United States need more U.S.-built and U.S.-manned icebreakers?” He foresees “significant potential changes coming in the next 10 years” as vessel owners and operators make decisions about routes and ship design.

Right now, however, there are crucial gaps in our knowledge about the Arctic. “We’re not where we want to be in terms of fore-

“We’re not where we

want to be in terms of fore-

casting ice formation, ice

breakup, ice floe move-

ment – that’s a challenge.”

-Michael S. Bruno, dean of engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology

Nunavik breaking the ice.

Hurricane Sandy’s surging seas destroyed a New Jersey resort made famous by MTV’s Jersey Shore.

©FEDNAV

SEA CHANGESEA CHANGE

28 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

CAPSTONE DESIGNSThe shipping challenges presented by polar ice occupy a special place for seniors at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Con-necticut. Cmdr. Thomas DeNucci, who teaches ship design, cut his teeth on icebreakers. His first assignment after graduating from the academy in 1998 was in New Orleans, where the icebreaker USCGC Healy was under construction. He sailed aboard Healy for three and a half years, and then worked in Seattle in support of the Coast Guard’s aging fleet of polar icebreakers.

Because the Coast Guard’s mandate extends to both national se-curity and commercial missions, the academy typically asks half its cadets to work on projects involving Coast Guard vessels for their senior design course. The other half focuses on commercial vessels. This academic year, “we have the commercial team designing what we call an Arctic multipurpose support vessel,” DeNucci says. “That’s a mouthful, but it describes what we’re really getting at,” he adds, tick-ing off possible functions from vessel escort to personnel transport, cruise-ship support, pollution response, towing, and ice management.

The concept mirrors developments in the shipbuilding industry. In 2012, Louisiana-based Edison Chouest Offshore built a 110-meter

ice-class vessel, Aiviq, to support Shell’s $4.5 billion bid to drill for oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. Designed for multiple missions, including handling anchors, towing, firefighting, light ice manage-ment, and personnel support, it even has a small hospital unit. The project went astray that New Year’s Eve, however, when the drill rig Kulluk ran aground as the support fleet was retreating to its winter home in Alaska.

Alaska is also the home of Sikuliaq, an 80-meter ice-strengthened vessel that at the end of 2014 was heading to its homeport of Seward, where the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks will operate it as an oceanographic research ship for the National Science Foundation.

Watching Arctic research closely is James Bond, director of shared technology at the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), one of several classification societies around the world that set standards for vessels and equipment and check that shipyards and operators are following the rules – an oversight role on which all marine insurance depends. In 2009, ABS set up a Harsh Environment Technology Center at Memo-rial University in Newfoundland to support applied research on ves-sels and structures operating in ice-covered waters, low-temperature environments, and severe winds and waves.

BURNING QUESTIONSDriving the surge in harsh-climate marine engineering is the abundance of untapped natural resources that lie under the icy polar seas. Though just 6 percent of the Earth’s surface, the Arctic could hold some 13 per-cent of the entire planet’s undiscovered oil reserves and 30 percent of its undiscovered natural gas — 84 percent of which is offshore, according to a 2008 estimate by the U.S. Geological Survey. As oil and gas explora-tion ventures into deeper water and more extreme environments, notes ABS, the industry must develop new ice forecasting and management solutions to ensure safe operations of its floating structures. Already, technologies are under development to model the performance of ice breakers under different conditions and maneuvers.

Bond, who is based in Houston, sits on one of the panels at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) that developed the Polar Code. In recent industry magazine articles, he has scoped out the need for research in a number of critical areas. They include the physics of ice-vessel interaction, such as how a moored drill ship can stay on station amid drifting ice; ice-load predictions and breaking, clearing, or towing ice near installations; mooring technologies for disconnect-ing and reconnecting units in ice-infested waters; winterization; cor-rosion; and designing vessels for remote Arctic locations that have greater capacity for stores, fuel, and spare parts.

Take just one practical problem: how to set a safe design service temperature for operating a crane at 30 degrees below zero.

“Temperature is not as straightforward as you might think,” Bond explained in an interview. “A lot of the design service rules out there right now statistically use the mean daily average temperature. We’re pushing a change to use the mean daily low temperature. Practically nobody ever thinks about the average temperature during the day; they either think of the high or the low.”

Things then get “even more tricky. If we say it’s going to be minus 35, the question is, how long is it going to be minus 35? Because if it’s only going to be minus 35 for three hours, then maybe there’s just some things you don’t do during those three hours. If your certifica-tion point for a crane is minus 30, maybe you just don’t use the crane if it gets lower than that.”

Bond contends more research is needed into polar ice, which extends from the shoreline out, and then comes up against the per-manent pack. “It’s rotating and they’re grinding against each other, and they’re making all kinds of nasty features for transits,” he says. Moreover, ice loss isn’t linear: The year 2012 marked an extreme low for the amount of ice in the Arctic, generating headlines. “There is definitely a trend – but 2012 looks like it may have been an anomaly,” cautions Bond.

ABS has a double interest in supporting university research. One is outreach: In 2014, it brought aboard 40 recent graduates in naval architecture. It’s also interested in filling in gaps in data. At the Univer-

sity of Michigan, for example, ABS is supporting work in such areas as computational fluid dynamics and robotic vehicles for underwater hull inspection.

Interest in Arctic shipping is leading to new research collabora-tions. At Newfoundland’s Memorial University, for example, engineer-ing Ph.D. students like Doug Smith are researching how to make seas safer at the top of the world through a recently launched four-school consortium sponsored by Lloyd’s Register Foundation. The Joint Cen-ter of Excellence for Arctic Shipping and Operations includes Fin-land’s Aalto University, the University of Helsinki, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Beyond being able to conduct important research, students can spend time at a partner school and establish their professional network.

While the melting Northwest Passage is a powerful example of both the effects of climate change and the engineering opportunities opening up as a result, it’s just one element of a broader environmental outlook at naval engineering schools. A Michigan freshman design-build course features not only an underwater robot but guest lectures on life-cycle assessment. Matthew Collette, an assistant professor of naval engineering, says the lesson is “basically environmental impact assessment, and carbon is a big part of that.”

The struggle to reduce emissions is having a huge impact on the marine industry – the port of Long Beach has led the way in the United States on mitigating pollution from vessels’ smokestacks. Collette, who is also founding director of Michigan’s Marine Struc-tures Design Lab, says students are looking for alternatives to die-sel, such as liquefied natural gas. Like the Coast Guard Academy’s DeNucci, Collette also finds increased interest in the Arctic among students working on capstone projects. Two or three have looked at intervention, maintenance, and repair vessels for oil wells, he says, “and I’ve had one LNG tanker designed to exploit the passage over Siberia from the Russian Arctic to Japan.”

Arctic shipping promises to keep students, researchers, and design-ers occupied for years to come, if the Nunavik’s progress is any indica-tion. The powerful icebreaker will ply the Canadian Arctic year round, hauling nickel concentrate from a Deception Bay mine to Europe and returning with equipment and fuel.

JANUARY 2015 29

SEA CHANGESEA CHANGE

Freelance writer and editor Peter Meredith has more than 30 years’ experience writing about shipbuilding and maritime affairs.

Sikuliaq, a reasearch ship operated by the University of Alaska

©James Buchanan

If engineers like what they do, why do so many – including some of the best – work out-side the field? An ongoing study seeks to understand the connection between engineering education and the workforce.

By Beryl Lieff Benderly

JANUARY 2015 31DESIGN BY FRANCIS IGOT

Today’s engineering graduate can expect relatively good pay and a large measure of satisfaction. His or her job will be secure,

though less so than that of a doctor, dentist, or lawyer. As time passes, the slow pace of career advancement will make the job less appealing. Among engineers with a bachelor’s degree, only petroleum engineers have a median pay higher than lawyers’; most fall well below. Of those who leave engineering after six to 10 years, a third do so for more pay and better promotion opportunities. Peak earning years, when many will be paying for their kids to attend college, find the median engineering salary reaching no higher than $109,000. Women in some engineering fields find themselves in a tiny minority.

So while it’s true that “the climate is excellent for engineers,” in the words of Darryll Pines, dean of engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, engineering as a career is a lot more complicated. That’s why

the National Academy of Engineering early last year launched a 20-month study of engineering career pathways. Chaired by Jean-Lou Chameau, president of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, a 13-member panel will assess “the expectations, training, employment options, and employment choices of those trained or em-ployed as engineers in the United States,” and thus “broaden the thinking of engineering educators, employers, and policy-makers about the con-nections between engineering education and the workforce.” For educa-tors, the panel intends to find out what more can be done in curricula and continuing education so engineers gain the knowledge and skills employ-ers demand. The study calls for a demographic and educational analysis of the people who work as engineers and those with engineering training who do other kinds of work, and the implications of their decisions and career pathways for engineering education at all levels.

30 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

Relatively small numbers of

engineering graduates remain

in the engineering discipline of their original training.

Beryl Lieff Benderly is a Washington-based writer and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

JANUARY 2015 3332 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

A centerpiece of the study was a two-day Wash-ington workshop in November entitled Pathways for Engineering Talent. Prominent among the themes raised in presentations and discussion was the wide range of endeavors where en-gineering degree holders are in demand and find success, many of them outside the formal boundaries of the engineering profession.

More than 40 percent of those with a B.S. degree in engineering work in non-engineering-related jobs. And as many as 25 percent of new gradu-ates consider careers outside engineering. A study led by Sheri Sheppard, associate vice provost for graduate education at Stanford University, cites the “troubling trend” that, over the past two decades, “the highest-performing students and graduates are leaving science and engineering pathways at higher rates” than lower-performing peers.

Educators need to keep this in mind as they consider the essential parts of an engineering degree. A point repeatedly made by workshop participants is that formal engineering education too often fails to provide all the skills — especially so-called professional or soft skills such as communication and collaboration – that students will need to prosper in the workforce. A similar point was stressed by business and other employers during a 2013 ASEE-National Science Foundation workshop, Transforming Undergraduate Education in Engineering. Even NASA, one of the most engineering-centric branches of govern-ment, needs engineers who are also knowledgeable about budgeting and regulatory affairs and who can work in teams and understand “how to talk to the press,” says Jeri L. Buchholz, the space agency’s assistant administrator for human capital management.

WHO IS AN ENGINEER? Vocational and statistical categories used in various data sets

and surveys often fail to capture the complexity of career paths and labor markets and their relationship to education, workshop participants complain. Not only do confusing, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory classifications make it “often hard to de-fine what people actually do in jobs,” but workers frequently move among categories during their careers, notes Chameau, the former president of the California Institute of Technology.

Further blurring the picture, nearly a quarter of individuals who are working as engineers don’t have an engineering degree. They include one fourth of NAE members, some of whom have no degree at all. Nonethe-less, those elected to the academy have made significant contributions

that, in the eyes of

NAE President Dan Mote, qualify as engineering.

Going beyond what he calls a “stilted view” of the profession, he says engineering encompasses a wide swath of work that “creates solutions for people and society” using technological and scientific principles. Projects such as the Large Hadron Collider, with its “thousands of physicists,” and the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars, which he termed “the greatest engineering achievement of this century thus far,” are widely considered scientific but are actually engineering, he argues.

VERSATILE SKILLS

Some workshop participants view movement of engineering stu-dents and workers into management, business, entrepreneurship, law, health care, government, policy, and other occupations as “leakage” from the engineering profession. Others consider it an appropriate and desirable use of widely applicable and effective abilities and knowledge. The computational ability, systems thinking, and analytic skills learned in engineering school “are highly desirable” to many kinds of employers, says NASA’s Buchholz – so much so that “people are poaching” workers with these competencies for careers in pharmaceutical and other techni-cal sales, big data, information technology, and more.

Management, leadership, entrepreneurship, and similar pursuits can also make good use of engineering knowledge, skills, and analysis. Indeed, 20 percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have first degrees in engineering, notes Gary May, dean of engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. But shifts in the economy and employment outlook re-quire engineering schools to monitor who is hiring their graduates and be prepared to adjust accordingly. A decade ago, major aerospace companies dominated the employers hiring his new graduates, says Maryland’s Pines. Today, large technical consulting firms “have pushed them out” of first place, a shift that has created a “push for soft skills.”

While “most schools are doing an excellent job producing the tech-nical skills that we need,” according to Dianne Chong, vice president of engineering, operations, and technology at the Boeing Company, em-ployers want more than that. As workshop speaker Samantha Brunhaver explains, engineering programs are often narrow and homogeneous and fail to provide opportunities to develop those other needed competencies. Brunhaver, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate who studies the career decision-making and professional formation of engineering students and practic-ing engineers, cited sophomores in engineering design and applied math, who tend to view an engineer as someone who uses theory and equations and designs and builds things. In addition to their technical competence, however, graduates also need to be “socially savvy” and have interpersonal skills and “contextual awareness,” she says.

Because nontechnical work plays a larger role in jobs than stu-dents expect, early-career engineers often struggle with their lack of nontechnical competence, Brunhaver continues. Particular chal-lenges include “cross-disciplinarity,” or the ability to work on tech-nical matters workers have not specifically studied; initiative, espe-cially the ability to speak up for oneself; and the difference between teamwork as taught in school, where groups tend to work together on a project, and collaboration as practiced in the workplace, where people with various responsibilities on a project go back to work in their own spaces instead of being physically together while they work. Different types of colleges, such as technical institutions and liberal-arts-oriented schools, have different cultures that produce different “flavors” of engineering graduates, she says. These differ-ences can influence graduates’ career pathways, with those from liberal-arts schools likelier to take jobs outside of engineering.

DEGREES OF SEPARATION

Fewer than half of people whose highest degree is in engineer-ing work in engineering occupations, and the rate is even lower for those who have gone on to earn a higher degree in another field, says Shulamit Kahn, associate professor in the school of management at Boston University. Many such people are in computer science or other science occupations and non-engineering management. About 20 per-cent of those who do work in fields defined as engineering occupa-tions, on the other hand, lack an engineering degree, having studied a range of other subjects. Relatively small numbers of engineering graduates remain in the engineering discipline of their original train-ing, but in this respect engineering does not differ from science fields.

Overall, Kahn says, people whose highest degree is in engineering are very likely to report that their jobs relate to engineering, with more than 90 percent calling them either closely or somewhat related. But,

she adds, “how we measure it is one thing. How they perceive it” is another. Even 70 percent of those who have left the field say their jobs are related to their highest degree and perceive themselves as “working closely to engineering or somewhat closely.”

The most important overall reasons for leaving the original field are pay and promotion, she says, followed by unavailability of a job in the field – a major reason that engineers within five years of graduation give for working outside of engineering. About 17 percent cite change of interest.

WHAT MOVEMENT MEANS Hal Salzman, a professor at the Rutgers University School of Plan-

ning and Public Policy, thinks the flow of people across disciplines is “the strength of U.S. higher education” and something the system should facilitate rather than “encouraging lock-in at an early age” as many other educational systems do. Right now, students who start engineering programs from the outset of college do best after they graduate in terms of earning good salaries, finding full-time work, and attending graduate school. Those who enter engineering later often miss out on valuable support structures offered early in pro-grams, notes Sylvia Hurtado, professor of education at UCLA, add-ing that late-comers also need and should get this help. In addition, workers who leave fast-moving engineering fields but later want to return frequently find that difficult or impossible because the field has moved on, says Stanford’s Sheppard, a mechanical engineer and a member of the NAE panel. This particularly affects women who interrupt careers to raise children. Educational opportu-nities to bring them back up to speed could really help.

Sheppard’s own re-search has revealed that while the literature on en-gineering education has prolif-erated, “relatively few studies have looked at the career decisions of engi-neering graduates.” The NAE’s study may provide some answers. Watch that space.

2013 “Profiles of Engineering and Engineering Technology Colleges” books

OUT NOW!For information on how to buy a copy, or for informationon how your school can participate, please visithttp://www.asee.org/papers-and-publications

ACADEMIC TOOLBOX BY MARY LORD

JANUARY 2015 35

Robotics Education and Competition Foundation, which runs VEX. In classrooms, however, robots typically crop up as projects

in electrical engineering and computer science — not as teaching tools. Cost has been a major barrier; sturdy, sophisticated robots like those used in research labs are too expensive to equip each stu-dent. McLurkin, director of Rice’s Multi-Robot Systems Lab, aims to flip that calculus along with the curriculum by using small, mobile robots to teach foundational theory in an engaging, hands-on way. Now in its fifth year, his introductory course was a “smashing suc-cess” from the start, says McLurkin.

The class was specifically designed for all experience levels — including students who had never used a screwdriver. “We want the students who’ve got the talent and the ability… but may not see themselves as engineers.” He particularly wants to open the door to students who didn’t have much opportunity in high school, “or maybe they’re brown, or female, and society told them they weren’t smart enough to be engineers.”

That warm welcome for newbies partly reflects McLurkin’s own odyssey into engineering. Growing up in Baldwin, New York, in the 1970s and ’80s, he quickly learned that geek wasn’t chic, particularly for an African-American male. He was bored at school, and his grades suffered. But his parents encouraged his inventiveness, buying him a “world-class” collection of LEGO sets. McLurkin built his first robot,

They clean floors, deliver drinks, fetch like pup-pies, even tell jokes. But can personal robots improve engineering education?

James McLurkin, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice University, cer-tainly thinks so. And no wonder. The pioneer of swarming robotics has seen his bagel-size ’bot transform an introductory engineering

course into an unabashedly fun way to convey circuits, mechanics, and other core concepts.

“My deep, secret mission to take over the world,” says McLurkin, is to make cheap, high-performance robots as ubiquitous in class-rooms as scientific calculators.

His course taps into a surge of student interest in robotics, starting at the K-12 level and continuing into college. Witness the enthusiasm surrounding VEX Robotics programs, which could attract as many as 13,000 competing teams worldwide this year — up from 10,000 last year. Demand from students eager to pursue VEX in college prompted the recent launch of a postsecondary program that now counts 300 universities, a burgeoning scholarship program, and partnerships with student chapters of professional groups such as the National Society of Black Engineers. “If they offer it, it makes their engineering de-partment more attractive,” contends Jason Morrella, president of the

CHEAP YET SOPHISTICATED

PERSONAL ROBOTS ENLIVEN AN

INTRODUCTION TO ENGINEERING.

ACADEMIC TOOLBOX BY MARY LORD

JANUARY 2015 3736 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

63

and the course is not intended to weed out less-prepared students, it’s no easy ride. Students learn this with a jolt during their first pro-gramming problem set: creating software so their robots can move toward light and avoid obstacles using infrared and bump sensors.

Competition and the ability to be creative prove highly motivating. A tic-tac-toe game, in which teams of four program a donor-ro-bot to win, often see “great reversals of for-tune” when the robot doesn’t go or collides with another, forfeiting a round. McLurkin awards $10 gift certificates and coupons for chocolate bars or to the LEGO store over the semester, around $250 in total — “not enough to notice in any budget, but it’s fun!” Also empowering is being able to customize a robot, changing the color of its lights, for example, or programming it to play music.

UNFORGIVING HARDWARE

One challenge for instructors — and with four teaching assistants, ENGI 128 is labor intensive — is ensuring the technology doesn’t outpace the students’ ability to use it. As McLurkin notes, “real hard-ware is unforgiving,” and because robots do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do, things can “go off the rails very badly.”

For example, getting the math wrong on

the veloc-

ity controls will send the robot spinning out of control. Assignments, he cautions, “have to be designed so when [students] get it right, they can see it.” It can be difficult for students to figure out what’s going on with embedded systems, like Python, because they can’t check the

robot’s program for bugs as easily as when program-ming their laptops. “It’s like looking at a map through a drinking straw,” says McLurkin.

Another challenge has been the students’ lack of experience us-ing tools. Unlike the Sputnik generation, whose schools had shop classes, many of today’s freshmen arrive not knowing they must push down on the screwdriver to loosen a screw. Despite such hurdles, however, most students remain undaunted and go on to study engi-neering, McLurkin says.

Instead of a single capstone assignment, a series of projects culmi-nate in a final 30-robot design challenge, such as “quaffling up” like Harry Potter for a spirited match of Quidditch, performed with robots rather than student-wizards on broomsticks. “They should get their hands dirty right away,” argues McLurkin.

Citing student surveys, McLurkin and his colleagues reported in a 2012 paper that ENGI 128 increased engagement, motivation, and

desire to major in engineering. Students bonded with their robots. Many gave them names and were sad to return them at the end of

the semester. Tough homework made most students work harder to ensure their robot’s success.

While educational robots like r-one are uncommon, entre-preneurial educators detect opportunity for more use of robots in the classroom. Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE lab, for example, has developed a $100 programmable, mobile robot to teach computer science to students as young as eight. The result of a four-year study, the bird-shaped Finch has light, tem-perature, and obstacle sensors, accelerometers, and support for

a dozen programming languages. And Harvard researchers are coming out with a $10.70 AERobot — for Affordable Education

Robot — designed to introduce the fundamentals of programming, logic, and robot controls to students of all ages.

Mary Lord is deputy editor of Prism.

Rover, in high school and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in elec-trical engineering and a master’s and Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along the way he earned a master’s in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and won the Lemelson-MIT student prize for innovation in 2003 for small, collaborative robots inspired by his own pet ants.

A BROAD INTRODUCTION

McLurkin developed “swarmbots” while working as lead research scientist at iRobot Corp. The cost — $2,000 each — made them pro-hibitive for a classroom. Shortly after arriving at Rice in 2009, he worked on a lower-cost version that could be built in his lab. The re-sulting r-one costs about $250 and packs almost the same research-cal-iber performance as the old model. At the same time, Rice opened the

Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, a 24/7 maker space full of state-of-the-art, real-world tools, which created demand for just the kind of experience McLurkin wanted to offer his students.

To develop the course, he collaborated with colleague Scott Rixner, a professor of computer science. Their goal was to pres-ent a broad, interesting introduction to electrical and mechanical engineering and computer science, so even students – especially women and minorities – who may not have known they were in-terested could make a better-informed choice of major. They com-

bined r-one with Python, now the premier teaching language, which

allows students to produce sophisticated software and commands, such as velocity control loops and simple light-sensor behaviors.

Their course, ENGI 128, includes control theory, gears, torque, thermodynamics, voltage, infrared systems, current, distributed al-gorithms. All are learned in the context of programming a robot to accomplish such real-world feats as lining up in numerical order or circling a stationary ’bot in a design project called the IR Olympics. Systems engineering is “the glue that ties everything together,” McLur-kin says. Programming robots helps students see how the basics of each discipline “fit in at that 10,000-foot level.” Unlike most educa-tional robots, which have limited hardware, the r-one lets students work with an advanced multi-robot system.

The debut went so smoothly that “I got a little spooked out,” McLurkin recalls. The course has since evolved. Most of the problem sets have design challenges, and striking the balance between ambi-tious and achievable can prove daunting. For example, there’s been a new version of the IR Olympics every year. The first year, students “hopelessly ran out of time” and had to take the design challenge home. It was simplified, but time remained an issue. Doing the code in pieces made the third iteration too easy, and the fourth version had errors in the code. This year, it became a planned take-home design challenge, but with a limited number of days the students could work on it. “There’s so many things you can do with robots, but you still only have 10 hours of time a week,” observes McLurkin.

To maintain students’ interest “you need to shock them every now and again,” McLurkin maintains. While the activities are fun

"WE WANT THE STUDENTS WHO'VE GOT THE TALENT AND THE ABILITY BUT MAY NOT SEE THEMSELVES AS

ENGINEERS."

© Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

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University engineering programs in the United States typically have high dropout

rates, ranging from 50 percent nationally to 75 percent at the university where our study took place. Whereas many previous studies have used large surveys to quantify the dropout problem, we sought to better understand why undergraduates leave engineering qualitative-ly, from their own perspectives. We recruited volunteers who had recently left the program at our university to talk about their experi-ences, sending an invitational email to the 120 students who had migrated out of engineering during their sophomore year in 2012. Very few responded, perhaps illustrating how painful it must have been for these recent dropouts to talk about their experience. Four former en-gineering students participated in our study. Here is the story of one participant, Zach.

To gather participants’ stories, we asked them to draw and then discuss pictures representing their journeys into and out of engineering. Zach’s illustration shows him starting at a high point and then plunging downward. His switch in majors is repre-sented by a rescue helicopter.

An engineer’s son with several years of work experience, Zach initially felt well prepared for and excited about pursuing a degree in engi-neering. At the beginning of his journey map, he shows himself as a happy surveyor on the top of the hill, seeing vast opportunities for the fu-ture. Zach and his wife had planned to purchase a home the weekend he decided to go back to school. “It was a choice between the house and school. We backed out of the house and chose school,” he said. Zach began his civil engineering curriculum at a branch campus of the university. Due to poor advising, he took three classes that did not count toward his degree and cost him an extra $1,000. He took all the engineering classes available to him at the branch campus, and then packed up his family to move across the state to complete his degree at the main campus.

After two semesters and several conten-

tious meetings with the engineering advisers, however, his attitude changed drastically. As depicted by the deep pit on his journey map, he described the engineering advisers as very condescending. “They sat there with all their power deciding who would hold the title of engineer and who wouldn’t. . . . They need to realize that I write their check.”

Zach’s frustration with advising and mount-ing financial stress, combined with increasing difficulty in his classwork, led him to lose con-fidence in his academic abilities. His grades dropped, and his motivation to study dimin-ished. Finally, Zach stopped referring to himself as an engineer, and began looking for a way out. Separating himself from engineering came at a high emotional cost. “I let myself down. . . . I used to make fun of other [non-engineering] majors, and now here I was one of them, a washout,” he said. He saw the business depart-ment (the helicopter in his journey map) as his savior from the quagmire of engineering. Zach transferred to the business department, where he is now earning straight A’s. He plans to grad-uate next spring, two full years earlier than he would have graduated from engineering.

HOW AN EXCITED STUDENT BECAME A ‘WASHOUT’What can we learn from engineering dropouts who succeed in other fields?By Matthew Meyer and Sherry Marx

While Zach’s journey into and out of en-gineering is unique to him, it illustrates the common challenges of other study partici-pants, including institutional factors such as inadequate preparation for the difficulty of the engineering program and time commit-ment required, and individual factors such as a loss in motivation due to poor performance in classes. All participants felt a deep sense of loss when faced with the prospect of failure in the profession of their choice. Zach broke into tears when describing how he had let him-self and his father down by “washing out” of the engineering program. Although all par-ticipants struggled in engineering, they were succeeding academically and satisfied with their new majors. The experiences of these four students could inform institutional ef-forts to retain engineering students.

JEE SELECTS RESEARCH IN PRACTICE

JANUARY 2015 39

Matthew Meyer is a doctoral student in engineering education at Utah State University, where Sherry Marx is an associate pro-fessor of qualitative research, ESL education, and multicultural education in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership. This article is excerpted from “Engineering Dropouts: A Quali-tative Examination of Why Undergraduates Leave Engineering” in the October 2014 Journal of Engineering Education.

Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters By Michael S. RothYale University Press 2014, 228 pages.

Heated by skyrocketing costs and economic pressures, challenges to American higher

education have intensified. Has a liberal arts education now become an unaffordable luxury, critics demand to know; and is college becom-ing both irrelevant and unnecessary for today’s economy? Among academics responding with a resounding “no” is Michael S. Roth. As presi-dent of Wesleyan University, Roth has long been involved in higher education, as well as his own scholarly research, which spans history, philos-ophy, and psychology. Roth firmly asserts that college teaches young people to think and to en-gage, allowing them to better themselves and their societies. “Liberal education matters far beyond the university,” writes Roth, “because it increases our capacity to understand the world, contribute to it, and reshape ourselves.”

Beyond the University is a clarion call to those concerned with America’s intellectual future, as well as, Roth would argue, its politi-cal, social, and competitive future. He scaf-folds an argument defending what he terms “pragmatic liberal education” – one that seeks to expand experience, understanding, and the ability to critique.

Roth traces the evolution of American edu-cational philosophies, examining the position taken by various thinkers and leaders from the very start of the Republic. George Washington advocated a nonsectarian national university that could "inspire national unity” and teach “the science of government.” Thomas Jeffer-son watched Washington’s political battles and ultimate defeat at the hands of Congress on this issue before turning to his own state

– and founding its state university. Jefferson was determined to stanch the loss of Virginia’s native sons to neighboring Kentucky, home to Transylvania University since 1780.

Jefferson linked America's freedom to free-dom of thought and supported an open cur-riculum: He wanted students to be free to make their own discoveries. It is a model that has con-tinued to serve the vision of the “liberal educa-tion,” yet his vision of free access to knowledge did not encompass everyone, notably excluding women, African-American slaves, and Native Americans. His oversight – and those of the leaders of his time – would inspire succeeding generations to fight their own battles for school-ing. Frederick Douglass identified education as the pathway out of slavery; Ralph Waldo Em-erson, in such essays as “Self-Reliance,” insisted that self-knowledge helps combat the dangers of conformity. Roth invokes Emerson’s strongly held belief that education should not encourage young people only to criticize existing systems; rather, education should foster the desire to cre-ate, improve, and contribute.

The book guides us through varying beliefs of such figures as W. E. B. Dubois, John Dewey, and Jane Addams, the early 20th-century ac-tivist whom Teddy Roosevelt labeled “the most dangerous woman in America” for her advo-cacy in behalf of workers and ordinary people. Addams felt strongly that greater knowledge could defeat class oppression while fostering so-cial responsibility and civic engagement. Roth allows critics of elite education their say, includ-ing the entirely self-made Benjamin Franklin, who lampooned the pretentiousness of Harvard University, idleness of its students, and vacuity of its education. Parents, “because they think their Purses can afford it, will needs send [their children] to the Temple of Learning," Franklin sneered, “where, for want of a suitable Genius, they learn little more than how to carry them-selves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely.”

This book explores provocative current is-sues about liberal arts learning today; yet, the discussion about technical education is dis-appointing. Too often Roth starkly pits the social, intellectual, and personal gains from liberal education against a narrow money-driven “vocationalism.” He writes, “In an age of seismic technological change and instanta-neous information dissemination, it is more crucial than ever that we not abandon the hu-manistic frameworks of education in favor of narrow, technical forms of teaching intended to give quick, utilitarian results.” Engineering academics who infuse depth, complexity, and responsibility into their curricula will justifiably object to such a limited understanding. It is not only through liberal arts that students can learn to “liberate, animate, cooperate, and instigate.”

Offering few serious solutions for finan-cially strapped families or students struggling to make ends meet, Roth fails to explain how America can shrink the growing divide be-tween those who can afford the “luxury” of a liberal arts education and those who cannot.

Robin Tatu is Prism’s senior editorial consultant.

A STRONG YET FLAWED CASETechnology gets short shrift in this defense of broad learning.

40 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

REVIEWED BY ROBIN TATUON THE SHELF

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JANUARY 2015 4342 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

ASEE TODAY YEAR OF ACTION ON DIVERSITY

Amlan Banerjee is a senior research as-sociate in our Assessment, Evaluation,

and Institutional Research office and one of the many expats who make ASEE headquar-ters a dynamic, diverse work environment.

A former practicing engineer, Am-lan was born in bustling Calcutta, a city he’s proud to note has made rich contri-butions to India’s cultural and intellec-tual history. He moved to Mumbai for graduate work at the Indian Institute of

Technology, where he met a visiting professor from the University of South Florida, who urged him to try his hand in the United States. Am-lan took the advice and earned a Ph.D. in civil engineering from USF.

“The first shock,” he notes about moving to a city the size of an average Indian suburb, “was coming to Tampa and not seeing many people in the street. People just don’t walk there!” The city’s large In-dian community and hot, humid climate helped ease his transition, however, and after his Ph.D. he and his wife, Nivedita, moved to Boston where he worked for a consulting firm. By 2010, he says, “I wanted to make a transition to computational social science, which is why I sought work in D.C.” After a stint at the Hudson Institute and later at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, he came to ASEE in 2014. His

focus has been STEM education, the high-skilled labor market, and international migration.

One cultural particularity brings a smile to his face, making this mild-mannered guy appear to be a troublemaker. Prior to getting married, he and Nivedita – “a hard-core civil engineer” with a focus in geotechnical engineer-ing – dated without her parents’ consent. In fact, her parents were already looking for a groom for her. One day, Amlan recounts, “we were walking down the sidewalk. It was very dark, and suddenly we saw her mom coming the other way . . . and things got exposed.” Adjusting to modern sentiment, her parents ultimately approved of the relationship.

The couple spend most of their time today caring for twins Aishik and Aishani, born in 2012. In his spare moments, Amlan likes to cook, his spe-cialty being rasmalai, a type of custard with cheese balls that is topped with slivers of nuts. Weekends find the family at various parks, including the regionally renowned Clemyjontri playground.

At ASEE, he says, “I have a lot of flexibility afforded to me by [office director] Brian Yoder to apply my skills and to approach projects cre-atively. That can be hard to find in many organizations. I like that I own my projects and can do things in my way with my ideas. Also, I’m active with our current HR-driven ‘employee involvement initiative’ and am eager to make a contribution to improve ASEE however I can.”

And ASEE is happy to have his skills. One could say it’s a marriage that anyone would approve of.

By Elizabeth Holloway

WHAT WORKS? A CULTURE CHANGEA clear-eyed look at four diversity strategies shows there can be no shortcuts.

ASEE’s Year of Action on Diversity is meant to spur us all into conversations

and actions that will improve the inclusion of groups underrepresented in engineering. Most of us want to do the right thing, want to support and encourage all people’s inclu-sion and success in engineering, but many of us struggle with knowing what actions we personally can take that will contribute posi-tively to diversity. An innovative framework developed at the Simmons School of Manage-ment for promoting equity in organizations can help guide our thinking about ways to achieve equitable, inclusive learning environ-ments. Applying these strategies to the class-room allows us consider classroom policies, behavior, and requirements in a place where we most often interact with students. Howev-er, each has drawbacks, as is explained below. In the end, only a strategy aimed at changing the culture is likely to succeed.

Equip the Underrepresented Group – This strategy assumes a deficiency in certain knowledge, experiences, or skills needed to take advantage of opportunities. It prompts us to think about what supplementary train-ing and experiences can be put in place to help an underrepresented group be more successful. In the classroom, for example, we may assume that all women need addi-tional skills in spatial visualization, or that no women know how to use the equipment in the machine shop, and so create interventions and experiences to supplement the deficiency. These experiences can help individuals from the underrepresented group be successful, but if they are offered only to those students, they can carry a stigma. Most troubling is the perception that if an individual does not succeed after participation in these interven-tions, it is his or her fault. However, there are times when these types of strategies are needed, particularly in situations where we are not able to change the culture that favors the majority population for success.

Create Equal Opportunities – The as-sumption here is that differences in group achievements or outcomes can be explained by discrimination or biases that result in un-equal opportunities. To compensate, we try to “create equal opportunities.” For example, we know that when students are working on teams, sometimes the women end up in sup-port roles, such as organizing or note-taking, and don’t always get a chance to contribute to team leadership or technical project de-velopment. So we put into place a policy that team roles need to rotate or that there must be two women assigned to a team, or we purposefully put women into leadership roles. There are times that these types of strategies are needed to ensure greater eq-uity, because we know that biases do exist. But they can create resentment, from both the majority and underrepresented groups. They are, in essence, a Band-Aid.

Celebrate Differences – In the class-room, we might make a special point of talking about the contributions of those from underrepresented groups to the field or what they can bring to a team environ-ment; such as, for women, better collabo-ration and teaming skills. This approach does help promote understanding and il-lustrates the added value provided by un-derrepresented groups, but it also assumes that everyone in a particular group shares the same experiences and strengths. Thus, it reinforces the very stereotypes that have exacerbated the group’s exclusion.

Change the Culture – Guided by a belief that all students in a classroom can succeed, we set up an environment that facilitates students’ learning in a way that promotes universal success. We might, for instance, emphasize the socio-cultural aspects of the course material, to stress thriving instead of merely surviving. This approach will almost certainly drive our teaching pedagogies to be more learner-centered, using and relying

on teamwork, collaboration, active learn-ing, and inclusive examples to ensure that each student connects to and masters the material. Difference, from this perspective, is seen as valuable and necessary in making us all better. Results show that this approach is the only one that has a hope of making significant, sustainable change. The draw-back? It’s hard work, very hard work. But when have engineers ever backed away from a challenge? Let’s all work together to make this type of change happen, so that all of our students, regardless of their areas of differ-ence, can be successful.

Elizabeth Holloway is assistant dean of engineering for under-graduate education and director of the Women in Engineering Program at Purdue University.

MAN OF MULTIPLE TALENTSM E E T YO U R S TA F F

BY N AT H A N K A H L

If someone had asked Randy Moses about career aspirations as a high

school sophomore, he might have said he wanted to study coral in the Florida Keys. To a kid born and raised on Air Force bases around the world, including five years scuba diving as a teen on remote Midway Island, marine biology beckoned.

But looking back, Moses sees “small things that add up” to his eventually be-coming a professor of electrical and com-puter engineering and associate dean for

research at Ohio State University’s College of Engineering. He spent hours on the floor with his Erector set as a kid – “I suspect some of the screws and nuts are still in the rug!” he laughs – and vividly recalls the first moments watching the Heath kit color TV he and his dad had assembled. “There was a brilliant, huge, color picture,” says Moses. “I remember being amazed that all these little parts came together to make that picture and sound and plucked that signal from out of the air.”

Good at math and science, Moses took chemistry and physics as a college freshman. Students at the time used an analog computer to solve differential equations. Hooked up to capacitors and resistors, it used electrical circuits to emulate physical processes, such as how shock absorbers work. The professor

asked Moses to “play with these things” and create some self-study labs. Reading up on analog computers, he realized the underlying math was the same as sig-nal processing, so he decided to pursue electrical engineering at Virginia Tech.

A life in academe evolved almost by accident. Moses found during four job interviews that industry required a master’s degree to do the kind of signal-processing work he’d enjoyed as an undergraduate. That led to a doctorate – and discovering a talent and zest for teaching. He decided to “try an academic career for a couple of years.”

Three decades later, Moses’s professional trajectory includes research stints in the Netherlands and Sweden, two books on spectral analysis, dozens of papers, several patents for lightning and thunderstorm detec-tion systems, and a host of teaching and research awards.

Moses’s current research focus involves creating 3-D radar images from small amounts of data, which could transform medical imaging and elec-tron microscopy along with defense technologies. As chair of ASEE’s En-gineering Research Council, he sees America’s need for engineers growing even as the environment for research funding becomes more challenging. Helping faculty members build research programs is a prime goal. “We get to take the idea of teaching to the next level,” says Moses, an IEEE senior member and DARPA award winner. “Universities are the nation’s primary force in creating new knowledge, and I see graduate students as training researchers to be the innovators of the future.”

RANDY MOSESResearch Mentor

B OA R D P R O F I L E

PROFESSIONAL OPPORTUNITIES

JANUARY 2015 4544 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

FACULTY POSITIONS IN ENGINEERING SCIENCES AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, BAKERSFIELD

The Department of Physics and Engineering invites applications for two positions starting in Fall Quarter, 2015. 1) TENURE-TRACK. The rank is open, but experienced candidates at the Associate or Full Professor level are especially encouraged to apply. The successful candidate will be expected to have excellent academic credentials, to be able to teach undergraduate general engineering courses (mechanical engineering core) such as lower-division statics, dynamics, mechanics of materials, and electric circuits (and associated laboratories), and upper-division courses such as thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and computational methods for engineers. Furthermore, the incumbent will pursue a research agenda involving undergraduate students. A Ph. D. in Mechanical, Chemical, or Petroleum Engineering or closely related field is required. Experience in the petroleum industry, an interest in engineering education, and familiarity with the ABET accreditation process are desirable. 2) FULL TIME (ACADEMIC YEAR) LECTURESHIP. The position is not tenure-track but it is renewable yearly pending funding, and subject to performance review. The successful candidate will have excellent academic credentials, and will be able to teach undergraduate general engineering courses and the associated laboratories. A Ph. D. in Mechanical, Chemical, Petroleum, or Agricultural Engineering or closely related field is preferred, but an M. S. will also be considered.

To ensure full consideration, apply by January 12, 2015 (positions open until filled). For questions, contact Ms. Lisa Kerr at 661-654-2664 or by email at engr-positions@csub.edu. Please see http://apptrkr.com/549777 for full position details. CSUB is strongly committed to excellence and cultural diversity. The university actively seeks candidacy of women, under-represented groups and all qualified individuals.

Hofstra UniversityTwo Tenure-Track Faculty PositionsSchool of Engineering and Applied Sciences Department of Engineering

The School of Engineering and Applied Science at Hofstra University in-vites applications for two anticipated tenure-track assistant/associate profes-sor positions in engineering. The start date for these positions is September 1, 2015. Hofstra University is the largest private, liberal arts institution on Long Island, NY. It is located 25 miles east of Manhattan. There are approximately 500 full-time faculty members, approximately 6,800 full-time and part-time undergraduates, and 3,000 graduate students. For information about the Department of Engineering please go to www.hofstra.edu/engineering.

Faculty Position in Civil Engineering

Applicants must have a Ph.D. in civil engineering. The successful can-didate should be a registered professional engineer or be able to obtain registration within a reasonable period of time. All areas of specialization within civil engineering will be considered although preference will be giv-en to candidates with a background in the following areas: construction engineering and management, geotechnical engineering, and transporta-tion engineering. A commitment to undergraduate education and excel-lent communication skills are a necessity. Additionally, candidates must demonstrate potential for scholarly research and for external funding.

Interested applicants should send a curriculum vitae, a statement of teaching and research interests, sample publications, and the names and contact information for three references to Dr. Margaret Hunter, Search Committee Chairperson, at SEAS3@Hofstra.edu.

Faculty Position in Mechanical Engineering

Applicants should have an earned Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, pref-erably in the area of mechatronics or equivalent specialty. The engineering programs at Hofstra are experiencing rapid growth, and the successful appli-cant will contribute to the further development of a top-tier undergraduate educational enterprise. Candidates must be effective communicators with a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching, be able to initiate sustained research, especially of a type that can integrate advanced undergraduates, and show initiative in seeking external funding for research.

Interested applicants should send a curriculum vitae, including a statement of teaching and research interests, sample publications, and contact information for three or more academic references to Dr. David Rooney, Search Committee Chairperson at the email address SEAS4@Hofstra.edu.

Hofstra University is an equal opportunity employer, committed to fos-tering diversity in its faculty, administrative staff and student body, and encourages applications from the entire spectrum of a diverse community.

Milwaukee School of EngineeringFaculty PositionMechanical Engineering

Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) invites applications for a faculty position at the Assistant or Associate Professor level for Fall 2015 teaching in the Mechanical Engineering Program.

The full-time faculty position is open to applicants of all areas of mechanical engineering. This position requires an earned doctorate in Mechanical Engineering (or a related field), relevant industrial ex-perience, and a strong interest in effective undergraduate teaching, integrating theory, applications and laboratory practice.

In addition to teaching duties, the successful candidate will be expected to become involved with academic advising, course/cur-riculum development, supervision of student projects, and continued professional growth through a combination of consulting, scholarship, and research. Excellent communication skills are required. The review of applications will begin as they are received and continue until the position is filled. Please visit http://www.msoe.edu to learn more about the position and to apply. EEO Employer F/M/Vet/Disabled

at Dartmouth seeks to add to an exist ing group of faculty active in energy-related research as part of a major expansion of faculty and programs. We are look-ing for a candidate whose re-search targets high-impact, system-level innovations and is well supported by Thay-er School's interdisciplinary approach to engineering re-search and education. Power systems engineering - e.g. in-volving accommodating re-newables, the smart grid, and related topics - is of particu-lar interest but other areas will be considered. The suc-cessful applicant will have a doctorate in engineering or a closely related field, be a gifted and motivated teacher, and show promise of leading an externally-funded research program. Applications at the Assistant Professor level are

FACULTYTENURE-TRACK

BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING

L O Y O L A U N I V E R S I T Y C H I C A G O ( L U C ) , E N -G I N E E R I N G S C I E N C E PROGRAM INVITES ap-plications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant Pro-fessor level, beginning July 1, 2015. Engineering Science will begin to offer its B.S. En-gineering Science degree in fall of 2015, and plans to seek ABET accreditation in fall of 2019. The specializations in this program are biomedical, computer, and environmen-tal engineering. For more de-tails about the program, visit http://www.luc.edu/engineer-ingscience. The successful candidate will be expected to

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actively participate in teach-ing undergraduate courses, within a system theory-based curriculum; and will develop a vigorous, externally funded experimental research pro-gram that will involve under-graduate students. A Ph.D. in bioengineering, biomedical engineering, or electrical en-gineering is required, with a research area related to signal processing for patient moni-toring medical devices. Pref-erence will be given to candi-dates with at least three years of experience as an Assistant Professor. Full-time industry experience is desirable. Can-didates for the position must demonstrate the potential for distinguished teaching and student mentorship or possess a record of such accomplish-ments. Candidates also should be willing to support the mis-sion of LUC and the goals of a

Jesuit Catholic Education. Ap-plicants should submit a cur-rent curriculum vitae, a teach-ing and research statement, and a letter of interest to www.careers. luc.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=57676 . Review of applications will begin on January 15, 2015 and applications will be accept-ed until the position is filled. LUC is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer with a strong commitment to hiring for our mission and di-versifying our faculty.

ENERGY SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

TENURE-TRACK FACUL-TY POSITION IN ENERGY SYSTEMS ENGINEERING T H A Y E R S C H O O L O F E N G I N E E R I N G , D A R T -M O U T H . T h e T h a y e r School of Engineering

PROFESSIONAL OPPORTUNITIES

JANUARY 2015 4746 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

University of IdahoChair PositionsCollege of Engineering

The University of Idaho College of Engineering is currently con-ducting searches for chairs in most departments of the college for Fall 2015. All positions require a strong commitment to depart-ment administration, teaching, research, and outreach as well as being a part of the college’s leadership team. If you are looking for a high quality college in a fantastic college town and a career that pro-vides an opportunity to make a significant impact, please consider applying. Review of applications will begin as they are received and will continue until the positions are filled. For information about our positions and to apply visit: http://bit.ly/uidahoprism.

To enrich education through diversity, the University of Idaho is an equal opportunity employer.

AT OLINWe define engineering broadly, from understanding people and their and their and their and their needs, to designing and delivering new technologies and services to society. Do you get excited about all of engineering? We do. Work with all of engineering? We do. Work with allus to enable change in engineering education at Olin, and beyond.

WE’RE RE-THINKINGRealizing positive change in the world requires thinking big and taking risks. Olin’s graduates are recognized for their creativity and initiative, and we collaborate around the world to change engineering education. But we know we can do better, and we’re always questioning our approaches. Olin has no departments; you’ll work with students, staff, and the whole faculty to realize learning opportunities for all.

ENGINEERING EDUCATIONWe are excited to co-teach in an experiential, interdisciplinary, student-centric environment. We enjoy fun, irreverent creative acts. We debate and contribute to educational theory as much as engineering practice. And we stretch to work outside our comfort zones.practice. And we stretch to work outside our comfort zones.practice. And we stretch to work outside our comfort zones.

We seek enthusiastic applicants for positions at any rank. If you hold an upper-level degree or have substantial experience relevant to Olin’s mission, are interested in developing engineering innovators, and want to drive change in engineering education, we’d love to hear from you. For more information, please see: www.olin.edu/searchwww.olin.edu/searchwww.olin.edu/search.

Olin College is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and specifically invites and encourages applications from underrepresented groups.

faculty search

Faculty Tenure-TrackEngineering Science

Wheeling Jesuit University invites applications for an Assistant/Associate Professor in Engineering Science beginning with the 2015-16 academic year for its new engineering science program. The ap-plicant must be enthusiastic about teaching at all levels of the under-graduate engineering curriculum, within a liberal arts setting including engineering, design, electronics and mechatronics. This position will be the first hire in the engineering science program and the success-ful applicant will have significant input in developing the curriculum.

The successful candidate will take an active role in ABET accredi-tation tasks and contribute to the mission of the university. A Ph.D. in an Engineering field is required, with a specialty in electrical, me-chanical, or mechatronics preferred. To apply, please send letter of application, vita, undergraduate and graduate transcripts, statement of teaching philosophy, and a list of three professional references. Ap-plications will be accepted through February 13, 2015. Applications can be mailed to: Wheeling Jesuit University, Director of Human Re-sources, 316 Washington Avenue, Wheeling WV 26003 or emailed to jobs@wju.edu. Wheeling Jesuit University is a liberal arts college of about 1,600 students located in the northern panhandle of West Virginia, about 60 miles south of Pittsburgh, PA. Qualified women and minorities are encouraged to apply. AA/EOE

encouraged, although excep-tional candidates at all ranks will be considered. Review of applications will begin imme-diately, with interview visits likely in March. A complete CV, statement of research and teaching interests, and contact information for three refer-ences should be sent by email at Thayer.Energy.Systems.Search@dartmouth.edu, at-tention Lee R. Lynd, Search Committee Chair. Dartmouth College is an Equal Opportu-nity and Affirmative Action Employer. We welcome ap-plications from & will extend equal opportunity to all in-dividuals without regard for gender, race, religion, color, national origin, sexual orien-tation, age, disability, handi-cap or veteran status. More information about Thayer School of Engineering may be found at http://thayer.dart-mouth.edu.

ENGINEERING SCIENCE

L O Y O L A U N I V E R S I T Y C H I C A G O ( L U C ) , E N -G I N E E R I N G S C I E N C E PROGRAM INVITES ap-plications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant Pro-fessor level, beginning July 1, 2015. Engineering Science will begin to offer its B.S. Engineering Science degree in fall of 2015, and plans to seek ABET accreditation in fall of 2019. The specializa-tions in this program are bio-medical, computer, and envi-ronmental engineering. For more details about the pro-gram, visit http://www.luc.edu/engineeringscience. The successful candidate will be expected to actively partici-pate in teaching undergradu-ate courses, within a system

theory-based curriculum; and will develop a vigorous, ex-ternally funded experimental research program that will involve undergraduate stu-dents. A Ph.D. in environ-mental engineering or civil engineering is required, with a research area related to wastewater treatment. Prefer-ence will be given to candi-dates with at least three years of experience as an Assistant Professor. Full-time indus-try experience is desirable. Candidates for the position must demonstrate the poten-tial for distinguished teach-ing and student mentorship or possess a record of such accompl i shments . Candi-dates also should be willing to support the mission of LUC and the goals of a Jesuit Catholic Education. Appli-cants should submit a current Curriculum Vitae, a teaching and research statement, and a letter of interest to www.careers. luc.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=57678 . Review of applications will begin on January 15, 2015 and applications will be ac-cepted until the position is filled. LUC is an Equal Op-portunity/Aff irmative Ac-tion employer with a strong commitment to hiring for our mission and diversifying our faculty.

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

B R A D L E Y U N I V E R S I T Y CATERPILLAR COLLEGE O F E N G I N E E R I N G & TECHNOLOGY DEPART-MENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING. The De-partment of Mechanical Engineering at Bradley University is accepting applications for a tenure-

track position at the assistant or associate professor level and two non-tenure track full time temporary instruc-tor positions starting Au-gust 2015. Applicants for the tenure-track position should have an earned Ph.D. in me-chanical engineering by the start date. Preference will be given to candidates in the gen-eral area of thermal systems, with a strong experimental background and proficiency with digital instrumentation and data acquisition. Appli-cants for the instructor po-sitions should have at least a M.S. degree in mechanical engineering or a related field, and significant teaching and/or industrial experience in one of the traditional areas of mechanical engineering; con-trols, design, thermo-fluids, instrumentation, or kinemat-ics. Review of applications will begin Dec 15, 2014. Ad-ditional information about the positions may be found at www.bradley.edu/offices/business/humanresources/opportunities/faculty

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, MECHANICAL ENGINEER-ING RA # 1744 New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) School of Engi-neering and Computing Sciences seeks an Assistant Professor in Mechanical En-gineering, with expertise in Solid Mechanics (full-time, tenure track; Old Westbury c a m p u s ) . R e s e a r c h a r e a s of interest may include Me-chatronics and Biomechan-ics. Candidates should have a Ph.D. degree in Mechani-cal Engineering or a related area, excellent communica-tion skills, and a solid track

record in academia or indus-try. Commitment to teach-ing and research at the un-dergraduate and graduate levels is required. Candidates with a record of sponsored research with external grants and/or industrial experience and extensive experience in Mechanical/Mechanism De-sign (kinematics), are pre-ferred. Successful candidates will share our vision to grow the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences into a leader in applied research and a premier source of student talent in the New York Met-ropolitan Area and globally. For consideration, e-mail your curriculum vitae, cover let-ter, and research and teaching statements to Jobs.SOECS@nyit.edu. Please reference job code RA #1744 in your sub-ject line. NYIT is an AA/EEO institution.

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR – T W O P O S I T I O N S ( 9 -MONTH, TENURE-TRACK, S T A R T D A T E A U G . 2 2 , 2015). Department of Me-chanical Engineering, South Dakota S ta te Univers i ty . Teach courses and conduct research in one of the follow-ing fields: (1) machine design/solid mechanics, (2) dynamic systems/controls/robotics . For a full list of qualifications and application process, visit https://yourfuture.sdbor.edu. Position is open until filled with full consideration given to applications received by January 1, 2015. For questions on the electronic employ-ment process, contact SDSU Human Resources at (605) 688-4128. SDSU is an AA/EEO employer.

MECHANICAL AND MATERIALS ENGINEERING

SCHOOL OF MECHANI-CAL AND MATERIALS EN-GINEERING, WASHING-TON STATE UNIVERSITY, PULLMAN, WA. CALL FOR ASSISTANT/ASSOCIATE/FULL PROFESSORS. The School of Mechanical and Materials Engineer-ing (MME) at Washington State University (WSU) in Pullman, WA invites applications for multiple per-manent full-time tenure-track or tenured faculty positions with 9-month academic ap-pointments in the Mechanical Engineering (ME) or Mate-rials Science & Engineering (MSE) programs starting on August 16, 2015. The suc-cessful candidate will be ex-pected to teach undergradu-

ate and graduate courses in ME or MSE, mentor diverse students, develop collabora-tive research, establish an ex-terna l ly funded research program, and publish schol-arly work. Applications will be considered for positions at all ranks (Assistant, Associ-ate and Full Professor) com-mensurate with qualifications. The school welcomes strong candidates who can comple-ment and collaborate with existing research programs in the School, the College of Engineering & Architecture, and industries in Washington including aerospace, advanced manufacturing and materials, and renewable energy. We are particularly interested in hir-ing in following two general areas: Advanced Manufac-turing with specific research background in automation, robotics, and process control;

PROFESSIONAL OPPORTUNITIES

JANUARY 2015 4948 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

Texas A&M University - Corpus ChristiFaculty PositionSchool of Engineering and Computing Sciences

Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi invites applications for 4 tenure-track engineering positions in the School of Engineering & Computing Sciences for Fall 2015. The School of Engineering & Computing Sciences prepares students to pursue productive careers and advanced degrees in engineering, computer science, or geospatial information science. Three of these positions will comprise a cluster hire focusing on unmanned systems: 1 with academic background in electrical en-gineering and 2 in industrial engineering. The fourth position is in mechanical engineering with expertise in thermal-fluids systems. 1. Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering (1) 2. Assistant Professor, Industrial Engineering (1) 3. Associate Professor, Industrial Engineering (1) 4. Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering (1) For specific details and qualification requirements on each position or to apply visit the following website, https://islanderjobs.tamucc.edu.

Positions open until filled (or recruitment canceled). Review of applications to begin as early as February 1, 2015.

Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi is committed to becoming an emerging research institution with unparalleled commitment to student success, closing gaps in achievement, and creating robust campus experiences. Located on our own island, we are surrounded by the water of Corpus Christi and Oso bays. The beautiful natural setting is enhanced by our modern, attractive, and state-of-the-art classroom buildings and support facilities, and our colorful landscaping, and plazas that lend a distinc-tive tropical feel to the campus. Our Hispanic Serving Institution status provides a foundation to attain significant impacts for improving the educational attainment of our regional students, and our strategic location on the Gulf of Mexico and on the cultural border with Latin America places the Island University in a perfect position to help realize its national and international prominence goals. TAMUCC is a learning centered institution committed to inclusive excellence.

TAMUCC is also the leading organization for the Lone Star UAS Center of Excellence and Innovation (LSUASC), one of the six Federal Aviation Adminis-tration (FAA)-designated Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) test sites in the United States. The research goals of LSUASC are aligned with FAA focal areas for safe integration of UAS in the National Airspace System.

Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer committed to diversity.

Western Carolina UniversityEngineering and Technology DepartmentDepartment Head and Ballenger Distinguished Professor

Ballenger Distinguished Professorship in Engineering and Department Head of Engineering and Technology. The Kimmel School at Western Carolina Univer-sity invites applications and nominations for Department Head and Cass Bal-lenger Distinguished Professorship in Engineering for its Engineering and Technol-ogy (E&T) department. The E&T department is on a growth trajectory offering bachelors degrees in electrical and general engineering with concentrations in me-chanical/manufacturing, electrical/computer engineering technology, and applied systems engineering technology. All programs are ABET accredited or pursuing accreditation. In addition, a master’s degree in technology is offered.

The Kimmel School has a strong commitment to project based learning throughout its curricula. This approach is externally supported through the Center for Rapid Product Realization. The center is a national and regional leader in additive manufacturing and reverse engineering. The position re-quires a Ph.D. in electrical, mechanical, or related fields in addition to relevant industry experience. We are seeking a national leader with a track record of developing external research and engagement with business, industry, and government to step forward to lead the department. For complete position details and to apply, visit our website at jobs.wcu.edu. WCU is an Equal Op-portunity/Access/Affirmative Action/Pro Disabled & Veteran Employer

design and manufacturing for medical sciences; reliability of microelectronics and micro/nano-systems; or manufac-turing of high performance composites. Energy Storage, Conversion, and Efficiency with specific research back-ground in next-generation batteries, fuel cells, and super-capacitors; functional mate-rials for energy applications; lightweighting with composite materials; or renewable fuels. The School of MME has 30 tenured or tenure-track facul-ty members, including 10 fel-lows of professional societies, 1,000 undergraduate students, and 150 graduate students. The city of Pullman, nestled in the rolling wheat fields of southeastern Washington, of-fers small-town charm, low crime, and Pac-12 athletics. It was named by Bloomberg Businessweek as the best place

to raise your kids in Washing-ton. Qualifications: • Earned doctoral degree in Mechani-cal or Materials Engineering or a closely related field prior to the start of the appoint-ment. • Demonstrated record of scholarly work and poten-tial to establish a robust re-search program. At least five years of research experiences in academia or industries are needed for consideration at the level of Associate/Full Professor. Candidates consid-ered at the rank of Full profes-sor are required to have a na-tional or international reputa-tion in their field of research. • Demonstrated excellent verbal and written communication skills, and commitment to col-laborate with diverse internal and external groups. Applica-tion: The Search Committee will accept applications until the positions are filled, with

candidate screening beginning December 31, 2014. An ap-plication should include: • a cover letter indicating field of interest including research and teaching, • a curriculum vitae, • a statement of research plans (2 pages), • a statement of teaching experience and in-terests (2 pages), • and contact information for four referenc-es. The application must be submitted online at https://w w w . w s u j o b s . c o m / p o s t -ings/15236. WSU is an EO/AA Educator and Employer. For additional information on Washington State Univer-sity and MME, visit our home page http://www.mme.wsu.edu/.

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

ASSOCIATE/FULL PROF. – CHAIRPERSON, MECHAN-

ICAL ENGINEERING RA # 1743 New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) School of Engineering and Computing Sciences seeks a Department Chair at the Associate/Full Professor in Mechanical Engineering, with expertise in Solid Mechan-ics (full-time, tenured; Old Westbury campus). Research areas of interest include Me-chatronics , Biomechanics , and Biomedical Engineer-ing. Candidates must have a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering or a related area, have considerable expertise in Solid Mechanics and Design, Controls and Automation, Dynamic Systems, or other re-lated fields, excellent leader-ship, administrative, and com-munication skills, and a solid publication record. Commit-ment to multi-disciplinary collaboration, teaching, cur-

riculum development, student advisement, and faculty devel-opment and mentoring is re-quired. Candidates must show evidence of sponsored re-search, contracts and external grants, and should have an es-tablished professional reputa-tion in appropriate fields with leadership capacity. The De-partment Chair is also expect-ed to re-invigorate the gradu-ate Mechanical Engineering MS program and demonstrate his/her vision for expansion to graduate programs in related fields. Successful candidates will share our vision to grow the School of Engineering and Computing Sciences into a leader in applied research and premier source of student talent in the New York met-ropolitan area and globally. For consideration, e-mail your curriculum vitae, cover letter, a representative publication,

and research and teaching statements to Jobs.SOECS@nyit.edu. Please reference job code RA #1743 in your sub-ject line. NYIT is an AA/EEO institution.

MULTIPLE ENGINEERING DISCIPLINES

FACULTY POSITIONS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TO-LEDO. The College of En-gineering at The Univer-sity of Toledo is seek-ing outstanding scholars and educators to fill multiple ten-ure track (TTR) and full-time lecturer positions starting in the 2015-2016 academic year. Candidates with strong quali-fications in the following dis-ciplinary areas and the ability to work across disciplinary boundaries are encouraged to apply. Bioengineering: 1

TTR position Chemical En-gineering: 1 TTR position (advanced materials for ca-talysis) and 1 lecturer Civil Engineering: 1 TTR position (structures or transportation) Electrical Engineering: 1 TTR position (power electronics/systems) Computer Science & Engineering: 1 TTR position (big data/cyber security) Me-chanical Engineering: 2 TTR positions (thermal systems and materials/manufactur-ing) Construction Engineer-ing Technology: 1 TTR po-sition Computer Science & Engineering Technology: 1 TTR position Electrical En-gineering Technology: 1 TTR position Mechanical Engi-neering Technology: 1 lec-turer position Applicants for TTR faculty positions must have an earned doctoral de-gree in the field specified or a related field. Applicants for lecturer positions must have an earned master’s degree or higher in the field specified or a related field. Success-ful TTR candidates will teach courses at both the under-graduate and graduate levels, supervise graduate students, develop external ly-funded research programs, and par-ticipate in outreach activities. Successful lecturer candidates will instruct and maintain undergraduate laboratories, teach classes in the curric-ulum, lead assessment and accreditation activities, and assist with undergraduate re-cruitment and retention ef-forts. Rank and salary will be commensurate with qualifica-tions, and startup packages will be provided for tenure-track faculty. Application review will begin in January 2015. Positions will remain open until appointments are made. Interested applicants

should submit a detailed cur-riculum vitae, statement of teaching philosophy, state-ment of research goals, and names and contact informa-tion of four professional ref-erences. All supporting ap-plication materials must be submitted online in PDF for-mat. For additional informa-tion on the positions and to apply, please visit https://jobs.utoledo.edu . The Uni-versity of Toledo is an equal access, equal opportunity, affirmative action employer and educator.

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In the romantic comedy Laggies, Keira Knightley plays a 28-year-old paralyzed

by doubt about the direction of her life. At first glance, I dismissed her “quarter-life crisis” as a trendy Hollywood invention. But conversations with recent graduates and leaders in engineering education have sparked a growing suspicion that the quarter-life crisis lurks in the shadows at the end of our undergraduate engineering pipeline. Like a movie monster, it has emerged undetected and is poised to wreak havoc.

Before dismissing this phe-nomenon as mere hype, consider what our engineering graduates say after less than two years in the workforce. “My job isn’t in-teresting,” they fret. “The things I do have little impact” and “I can’t move around within my compa-ny for at least three to five years,” they lament. Our graduates enjoy hefty salaries and great benefits, but that’s not enough to stay in an unfulfilling job. And while they don’t like their current job, they aren’t sure what they want to do. Some are considering graduate school or a start-up com-pany. Others bolt to non-engineering jobs. One alumnus wishes he was an undergrad again.

This angst reflects, at least in part, our efforts to innovate the undergraduate cur-riculum. We recruit millennial students to engineering with the promise of making a difference in the world. We retain them with engaging, project-driven curricula and pro-vide extracurricular programs where they build cars for the Shell EcoMarathon, design water-filtration systems for Engineers With-out Borders, enter senior projects in business-plan competitions, conduct research with top

faculty, and tackle societal problems through the Grand Challenge Scholars Program.

Millennial students are the “food court” generation. They expect to be able to cus-tomize their lives by selecting from a wide variety of interesting choices – a chai tea from Starbucks or chicken quesadilla from

Taco Bell. The disconnect comes when they graduate from our engaging and challenging undergraduate smorgasbord and go to work for companies that operate under the baby boomer “we-are-all-having-fried-chicken-for-dinner” mentality. They don’t want to be pigeonholed in a job where they can’t gravi-tate toward what interests them. Nor do they want to do repetitive tasks with little oppor-tunity to make a difference, or labor for five years before being able to move around in a hierarchical company.

Sure, someone must do those uninterest-ing jobs. But millennials don’t buy the old ar-guments about needing to prove themselves first. They are bored, unchallenged, unmoti-vated – to the point of abandoning lucrative

salaries to do something interesting in an en-vironment where their work can have impact. Think Silicon Valley start-up.

Our graduates will work hard. They just want that work structured in a different way. Unfortunately, many engineering jobs don’t offer that option. Yet I do see recent graduates

who are happy. Some work for large companies where they get to pursue an M.B.A. on the side, conduct research with a direct impact on soci-ety, or participate in rotation programs that expose them to different parts of the business. Some work for smaller com-panies or flat organizations that provide a variety of tasks and the opportunity for more control over their work.

My fear is that these jobs are too few, which is why the quarter-life crisis needs to get on our radar now. We already struggle to produce enough

engineers to meet workforce demands and still attract too few women and minorities. Meanwhile, we are losing some graduates to non-STEM jobs. We have revamped the entrance to the undergraduate engineering pipeline. Curricular and generational changes now require us to focus on the pipeline’s exit.

ASEE academic and corporate members can work together to rethink how to take in new employees and restructure their work to provide greater flexibility and impact. If we fail to act, we may soon find ourselves re-sponding to an engineering workforce crisis of Hollywood-blockbuster proportions.

Jenna P. Carpenter is the associate dean for undergraduate studies in the College of Engineering and Science at Louisiana Tech University.

LAST WORD

52 ASEE-PRISM.ORG

OPINION BY JENNA P. CARPENTER

FOR GUIDELINES FOR SUBMITTING A LAST WORD OPINION ESSAY, GO TO WWW.ASEE.ORG/PRISM/SUBMISSION-GUIDELINES.

FRUSTRATIONS OF THE ‘FOOD COURT’ GENERATION Graduates will leave engineering jobs that lack meaning.

MILLENNIALS ARE BORED, UNCHALLENGED,

UNMOTIVATED — TO THE POINT OF ABANDONING

LUCRATIVE SALARIES TO DO SOMETHING INTERESTING IN AN

ENVIRONMENT WHERE THEIR WORK CAN HAVE IMPACT.

HonoraryMembership

ASEE

Do you have a nominee for ASEE Honorary Membership? This award honors members or nonmembers of ASEE for eminent and distinguished service to humankind in engineering and

engineering technology education or allied fields.

PAST HonorEES incluDE:

1958: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Army general, 34th U.S. President, launched the Interstate Highway System and DARPA1961: Vannevar Bush, mobilized scientific research in World War II and proposed what became the National Science Foundation1966: Frederick Terman, electrical engineer and “father of Silicon Valley”1967: Stephen Timoshenko, pioneered the academic field of engineering mechanics1991: Erich Bloch, revolutionized the computer industry, headed NSF1994: Norman R. Augustine, aerospace leader, champion of research and engineering education

There has not been an honoree since 1994. Now is your opportunity to raise ASEE’s profile by nominating an eminent candidate who will be recognized in June 2016. Nominations consist of a career brief (about one page) along with a proposed citation. Honorary Membership is intended to recognize those individuals who are not members of ASEE. A maximum of two honorees may be awarded each year. Details are provided in the ASEE Bylaws, Article I, Section 1, Subsection G.

Nominations may be submitted online: http://www.asee.org/member-resources/awards/guidelines/awards-nomination-guidelines#Electronic_Awards_nomination_Form Please act no later than February 28, 2015.

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