Applying the Core: Creating Relevance Contextualizing Professional Development for STEM Careers

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Interdisciplinary (99)In packed engineering curricula, engineering students lack exposure to professional skills development. The only way to add professional skills into the curriculum without loss of critical technical content is to integrate these skills into an existing technical context. Most engineering students express a desire to understand their field and its broader impacts and applications to society. We combine this desire with the need for professional skills development using pedagogical techniques focused on collaborative learning (where the sum of what students learn far exceeds what the instructor teaches through the value imparted by authentic interaction with peers and both industry and academic representatives within the field). The result is a course "Applying the Core" focused on bridging topics of engineering science with applications of engineering design; communication, networking, life balance, and other professional development skills used, in an integrated streamlined format to provide the necessary scaffolding to building such a bridge. This is the intellectual merit of the project. This project focuses on piloting the course (in electrical engineering) while doing the necessary research to confirm the attaining of these objectives. For broader impacts, the project also creates a foundation for generalizing the course to other sub-fields of engineering, other faculty, and other institutions.