2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Bridging the Gap between Higher Education and Career through a "Job Talk" in an Upper-Level Environmental Engineering Course

Presented at Student Projects in Physics Education, Engineering Physics and Physics Division (EP2D) Technical Session 2

Students pursue higher education to improve their professional opportunities, yet education does not always directly relate to professional practice. This report discusses an assignment in a graduate-level water quality engineering course meant to explicitly connect course content to working in a related sector. To complete the assignment, students investigated a job of their choosing and networked with someone currently in that job to inform their ultimate appraisal of whether the position is one they are still interested in. The impact of the assignment was assessed quantitatively (via students’ post-assignment responses on a Likert scale) and qualitatively (via open-ended questions). Students reported that the assignment was beneficial in connecting the course to relevant professional opportunities, but they saw concrete ways to improve the assignment for the future.

Authors

Dr. Joe Dallas Moore http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5739-2218 Carnegie Mellon University [biography]

Joe teaches across the Civil and Environmental Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon University. After undergrad at Wabash College, where he studied biology and French, Joe taught high school science through Teach For America in the Chicago Public Schools. He found engineering by writing about water resources in the American Southwest. As a PhD student studying the interactions between engineered nanomaterials and bacteria, he earned a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and was selected as a National Academy of Sciences and Engineering Science Ambassador. He is passionate about active, inclusive, and interdisciplinary engineering education, building community among faculty around teaching. He is also interested in creating online education programs. And he loves to run, eat, and spend time with friends and family.

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