2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

How might student-alumni interactions enhance classroom learning objectives and also guide engineering leadership curricula and programming? This research is directed through an engineering leadership program that focuses on ethics and liberal arts pedagogy. It will be centered on a particular course that tasks students to interview alumni in engineering workplaces about insights regarding “street smarts” and to seek professional advice. The course is framed through learning objectives related to leadership theory, intelligence theory, and communication skills. As a second year undergraduate student both taking this course and moving through the program, I will conduct the research through stages while being supervised by a cultural anthropologist who teaches the course. In the first stage I will read research about Sternberg's theory of "Successful Intelligence" and how it might relate to the idea that leadership requires a breadth of knowledge which surpasses the traditional concept of “book smarts”. In the following stage I will conduct a thematic analysis of approximately 50 “memos” written by students to report on their interviews with alumni. The intentions of this analysis stage are to identify the alumni’s perceptions on the concept of “street smarts”, identify specific skills that alumni associate with “street smart” engineering leaders, and to categorize the competencies and knowledge areas that the alumni identify as necessary for “street smarts” in their particular engineering environment.
This research is just beginning and is subject to change as we discover more about the nature of the topic. The preliminary findings will be used to inform the next offering of the class as well as potentially pilot a method for further research to inform ethics education. There are implications in creating future scaffolding for engineering leadership curricula as I will be making recommendations for the leadership program based on my analysis. The hope is that, through alumni outreach, we can identify competencies to prioritize in equipping students with the non-technical skills needed for effective engineering leadership.
The ambition behind this research is to work towards creating an education system that is reactive to the complicated nature of the modern world. Current education excels at helping students develop technical skills and theoretical knowledge, or “book smarts”, but can fall short of its potential to foster practical and non-technical skills. We envision an education that equips students with communicative and adaptable skills, enabling them to dynamically tackle problems presented by a rapidly changing and exponentially complex world. Being that this is a student research project, the process may provide a model for undergraduate engineering leadership where students can involve themselves, as researchers, in personal as well as curricular development. We hope that LEAD division members can benefit from the insights our alumni provide regarding “street smart” leadership competencies as well as from our experience integrating student-alumni interactions to enhance learning and curriculum design.