Engineering at Dordt College

This summer I attended two conferences. The first was the American Society for Engineering Education’s Annual Conference (ASEE Annual Conference), held in Pittsburgh (pictured) during the last full week of June. The second was the Christian Engineering Educators Conference (CEEC) held at Geneva College in the days following the ASEE Annual Conference. In this blog posting, I’ll report my impressions of the ASEE Annual Conference. In the next I’ll report on the CEEC.

The one overwhelming theme I heard at the ASEE Annual Conference is that engineering graduates must be prepared for new and grand challenges. Due to globalization, many jobs can be done anywhere in the world. Already manufacturing jobs are distributed according to world-wide labor costs and infrastructure availability. This will soon be happening with many more jobs, including engineering jobs. But location still matters. There is synergy between colleges, small enterprise businesses, and venture capital networks. These personal relationships that cannot be well-maintained over long distances will always be meaningful. It struck me that these local relationships exist on the basis of shared worldviews, although that concept was not voiced by any at the conference.

Another theme heard was that innovation is found at the boundaries. Making things smaller, lighter, faster, or conversely, bigger, stronger, more durable, etc. is what is difficult and thus valuable. Increasingly, these innovations tread over traditional boundaries. For example, it was once thought that, scientists discovered a new theory, enigneers applied the new theory, and business manufactured and marketed the resulting product. The present situation is much more complicated. In particular, engineers are becoming generalists, being involved in basic science (discovery) and in manufacturing techniques, etc.

A final theme was the number of references I heard to the National Academy of Engineering’s “Grand Challenges Committee.” On February 15, 2008 this committee made the following recommendations and called them, “Grand Challenges” for modern government.

• Make Solar Energy Economical
• Provide Energy from Fusion
• Develop Carbon Sequestration
• Manage the Nitrogen Cycle
• Provide Access to Clean Water
• Engineer Better Medicines
• Advance Heath Informatics
• Secure Cyberspace
• Prevent Nuclear Terror
• Restore and Improve Urban Infrastructure
• Reverse Engineer the Brain
• Enhance Virtual Reality
• Advance Personalized Learning
• Engineer the Tools of Scientific Discovery

These are what engineers are currently thinking about. I was impressed at the volume of the call for broadly educated engineers who understand science, economics, marketing, government, and more.

By the way, the slides of the main plenary of the conference, given by Dr. Charles M. Vest, President of the National Academy of Engineering, are available online. You will find the same themes that I just reported on in those slides.

In my next blog post, I’ll write about the CEEC. At the ASEE Annual Conference we heard about the challenges, but at the CEEC, we discussed answers for the “so what?” questions.