Designing the Human-Centered Engineer

A Mashup of Life Design and Professionalism within Dartmouth’s Capstone B.E. Course

At Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering, the final required two-quarter capstone for Bachelor of Engineering students is a 20-week project experience with an industry sponsor. This sequence historically includes professional development content supporting ABET requirements for the degree, such as leadership, ethics, equity, and economics. These topics were previously introduced individually, sometimes through a lecture, a guest speaker, or an isolated assignment. 

In the Fall of 2022, the teaching team introduced Designing the Human-Centered Engineer (“DtHCE”)—an integrated sequence that mashed up life design and engineering professionalism experiences. The purpose was to introduce students to both the life/career introspection and action that DYL fosters so well and to enliven the engineering professionalism content with DYL culture (e.g., curiosity, experimentation, collaboration, music). The emotional-cultural goal was to increase students’ optimism for their futures. 

The sequence included six 50-minute sessions and six assignments (which averaged 2-to-3 hours in length). The course had 86 students, divided into four sections; thus each DtHCE session was delivered four times, giving the teaching team an opportunity to iterate quickly. 

Sessions and Assignments at a Glance:

Session Focus and Activities

First Session Focus: Introducing Sequence and Design Process Refresher

Activities:

• Meet your “DtHCE Table”

• Transitions (Bridges, W.) excerpt

• Slides: DtHCE overview

• Slides: Design process refresher

• Discussion: Why apply design to life?

Second Session Focus: Storytelling and Networking*

Activities:

• Check-in with table

• Warm up “preview” of Schmoozapalooza

• Slides: Networking overview and dysfunctional beliefs 

• Write your elevator pitch(es)

• Miniaturized Schmoozapalooza

*This lesson was placed here because this was two days before their engineering career fair. 

Third Session Focus: Life Specification and Maker Mix

Activities:

• Check-in with table

• Slides: Specifications refresher

• Reflection to tee up MakerMix

• Project presentation tips

Fourth Session Focus: Ideation & Odyssey Plans

Activities:

• Check-in with table

• Creativity stoke (warm-up)

• Slides: Brainstorming refresher

• 3x3x3 to prep for Odyssey Plans (Sketch three divergent 3-year plans in three minutes each)

Fifth Session Focus: Prototyping and Manifestos

Activities:

• Longer check-in in tables: share Odyssey Plans

• Slides: Prototyping refresher

• Write “How might I learn” questions to tee-up prototyping

• Gallery tour: everyone brainstorms prototyping suggestions for everyone

• Slides: Manifestos in creative disciplines (excerpt from You Need a Manifesto, Burgess-Auburn, C.) 

Sixth Session Focus: Watching the Manifestos! And Next Steps...

Activities:

• Grab popcorn and candy

• Watch your table’s Manifestos and discuss

• What’s next? Self-directed personal and professional development.

Reflections:

The teaching team shared reflections both about individual components as well as about the DtHCE sequence overall. On the feedback for individual components, students were asked to name their three favorite components of the sequence and their three least favorite components. Interestingly, no component received fewer than 10 votes or more than 30 for either “among three most favorite” or “among the three least favorite.” By small margins, students voted for Odyssey Plans (assignment #4), Networking Overview (session #2), and Economics Module (assignment #2) among their top three favorites. Again, by small margins,  students voted the whole first week (session #1 and assignment #1, both the miniaturized Good Time Journal and the miniaturized Reflected Best Self) among their three least favorite components, by small margins. The teaching team, themselves, felt the manifestos (session #5 and assignment #5) and the ethics assignment (assignment #3, part 2) were successful,whereas the Maker Mix (session #3 and assignment #3, part 1) might not have been the best way to marry specifications with life design content for undergraduates. 

Overall, the teaching team was pleased with the learning outcomes, the emotional outcomes, and, by-and-large, the student experience. A few examples of anonymous feedback from students:

• “Many times I feel that there is a societal expectation to ‘know what you want to do,’ be that ‘when you grow up’ or ‘when you graduate.’ I feel that the most valuable thing I learned in DtCHE is that 1) you don't have to know innately what you want to do and in fact 2) you can apply thoughtful and tested strategies to think deeply about to prototype might want to do without needing to be certain.”

• “I really appreciated the deep introspection that the sequence encouraged. I have often felt like I'm not truly an engineer, perhaps since Dartmouth is primarily a liberal arts school and breadth over depth is emphasized. The focus on ‘the engineer’ as a professional was a refreshing change.”

• “[I gained] A more positive attitude towards my outlook of finding a job and having a good career. Additionally, the lesson about introducing myself in a professional setting was very helpful, and it convinced me to actually attend the job fair (although I was nervous)”

Students’ overall critical feedback largely focused on the amount of time the sequence took from their project work, and they expressed a wish that the content was more distributed throughout the degree program. (e.g., “teach the topics in depth throughout the course of the engineering degree, not squeezing them in here during an already very busy course” and “I would prefer to have way less professionalism stuff and have more time to meet and work with my group. Some of these DtHCE assignments felt like an extra burden because of the amount of time and thought that they required.”) 

Heading into this experiment, the teaching team was most worried about making this content mandatory for all students in an engineering degree program. Students' reactions were indeed strong and bifurcated. Despite the DtHCE sequence comprising less than a quarter of the overall course material, reviews of the sequence, both positive and negative, dominated the students’ qualitative feedback of the course overall. Roughly half of the students listed DtHCE among the most effective aspects of the course, while roughly another quarter listed DtHCE as among the areas most in need of improvement. Thus, only the remaining quarter of the students focused their reviews on other aspects of the course that took disproportionately more time and attention (and in their grades) than the DtHCE sequence.. 

While the teaching team was not surprised that a subset of students did not like dedicating mandatory time to self-reflection and personal and professional development (that has been the case in past formats of professionalism content as well), the team was worried this might impact other students’ experiences, especially given that students worked in small 3-person groups and the degree to which life design relies on an engaged culture. This worry, however, did not seem to materialize. Even students who may have been disgruntled with this content gamely engaged in the small group discussions. 

For next year, the teaching team plans to revisit whether to marry engineering professionalism with life design. While this initial experiment took previously atomized professionalism content and brought it into a cohesive experience, the teaching team wonders if “two independent cohesive sequences” might be the happy medium by wrapping engineering professionalism content into one mandatory sequence that borrows from the culture of life design and offering an additional optional life design experience for interested students during a period, perhaps between terms in December, when students aren’t balancing as many commitments. No firm decisions about iteration #2 next year have been made yet. 🙂

To learn more about this experience, please contact Prof. Rafe Steinhauer: https://engineering.dartmouth.edu/community/faculty/rafe-steinhauer