Helping new students learn about the program at Celebration of Mines

For my service learning pillar, I served on the Grand Challenges Grand Council (GCGC) for three years from its founding in the Spring of 2017 to my last term as President in the fall of 2019. I had the honor of serving as Vice President for the first year and President the following two years.

As Vice President, my goal was to build a foundation for the new organization. This required a lot of stakeholder engagement ranging from working with the Students Activities office so to understand the requirements of an organization to working with the GCSP Director to chart a course for the group. I aimed to gain insight from the student members by holding office hours. This didn’t turn out the way I wanted as no one attended them. Through this failure, I found out other methods for scholar engagement such as fostering one on one relationships for in-depth feedback and sending out surveys for online engagement.

Representing Mines at the GCSP Annual Meeting in 2018

As President, I continued this goal for stakeholder engagement. This meant setting up a monthly meeting with the GCSP Director to ensure harmony between the Scholars Program and the Council so we could best support each other. Along with this, I was able to work on charting a course for the program itself by compiling student feedback and working with the Director to come up with new events and strategies to deliver the most value to scholars.

This constant work in bringing together the experiences and knowledge of my peers helped me immensely in my internship at IPAX. As a small medical manufacturing company, IPAX had to balance engineering with operator experiences. Through my work on GCGC, when working on nonconformance reports, I was able to identify my stakeholders and bring all of their knowledge together before tackling a solution.

CDOT Headquarters

For the summer of 2017 and 2018, I interned at the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT). There I worked as a part of the bridge management side of Staff Bridge, where we focused on managing Colorado’s 8,000 bridges. For my first summer I worked as part of a team of interns who gathered vertical clearance data by lane and put it into a database. This involved pulling the data from inspection folders and then working with various stakeholders at CDOT to make sure the data was organized in way that could actually be used. 

One of the bridges on I-70 we used to validate our measurement techniques

I used this experience for my Project Based Learning Experience pillar because it was a real-life cube problem for me, reminiscent of the project I had worked on as a first year student for my Interdisciplinary pillar. As a mechanical engineer, I had no background in civil engineering and had to find out ways to learn all of the civil jargon as well as procedures. This involved learning to ask questions all the time and make sure I always fully understood what I was doing. It also involved the interdisciplinary approach I learned in my first pillar as I often needed to work with other engineering groups but also non-engineering groups like finance to complete projects.

My Cube! Here I got use to use my GCSP competencies in the real world.

During my second summer at CDOT, I learned how to communicate with non-engineers critically important engineering matters. The funding for bridge maintenance was determined by a board of community members with little to no experience in engineering. One of my projects was to collect data and argue that more preventive money allocation would lead to lower emergency maintenance costs. I pulled together data from other departments of transportation as well as data from CDOT while minimizing engineer jargon to create a presentation to demonstrate the immense need without requiring deep technical knowledge into the matter. Experiences like this have helped me bridge the divide between engineers and non-engineers as we can do great things together.

For my Entrepreneurship pillar, I decided to take EBGN 360, “Introduction to Entrepreneurship.” The class focused on students forming small groups dedicated to forming a “startup” based on an initial idea.

Home Page for our prototype site

My group focused on using technology to make close call decisions in sporting games. As we explored this problem further, we realized this problem was way out of our scope of knowledge, so we pivoted to making a better training program for referees. As we continued to research and talk to referees in the community, we found there was an untapped market in small community referee training as it was difficult to get training for parents. We then spent the next month setting up a system for training parents via online learning modules. As we were working on the solution, we realized an opportunity existed here at Mines to revamp the current IM training system and decided to put our final work into developing a solution to better train student referees. While a final product never emerged, deep learning of entrepreneurial pivoting did emerge.

Prototype video describing offside rules for IM referees

I ended up using this unexpectedly outside of the Grand Challenges as President of the Epsilon Alpha Chapter of the Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity here at Mines. One of the challenges I faced was finding a way to increase member engagement. I utilized my stakeholder engagement skill set to work with other chapters to see how they solved the issue along with members from my chapter. From this, I decided to implement a point system but as a pilot program. Each week we would discuss the successes and failures of the program ready to scrap what failed and try something new. By doing this, we were able to develop a robust system that encouraged member participation while fixing mistakes made as it was rolled out.

For my Global Awareness pillar, I took HASS 425, “Intercultural Communication.” I went into this class thinking that it would focus on etiquette and cultural norms of other countries. The class actually entailed looking at how we communicate and how this communication breaks down for a large variety of invisible reasons. For one, we learned about airplane crashes caused by high context communication where cultural hierarchy prevented aircrew from communicating the impending doom to pilots. This understanding is crucial in international business, as understanding that communication gaps are due to cultural reasons allows these stumbling blocks to be overcome with shared intercultural bridgework.

Intercultural Praxis Model. Source: Dr. Kathryn Sorrells

We also learned how intercultural does not have to mean American or Russian but also male and female or rich and poor. Intercultural communications happen every day as people from different backgrounds and experiences come together to work. A lot of my work in the class focused around privilege and understanding how the opening or closing of invisible doors in one’s life greatly charted their views and actions. We saw how it charted male versus female life at Mines where girls in STEM have a drastically different experience fraught with gender biases. This has a great effect on communication as some experiences are not shared across gender, which has the potential to cause friction but also the potential to create a diversity of experiences delivering an even better solution.

Turns out I’m not Tuk-Tuk Sized, one of the many exciting intercultural hurdles I had to overcome in Chennai, India

In the course, we learned a technique called, “intercultural praxis”. In using this, one goes through a process of Inquiry, Framing, Positioning, Dialog, Reflection, and Action as they traverse intercultural communication. I was lucky enough to use this at a conference in Chennai, India, that same semester, where I used intercultural praxis in my interactions with people from outside the US. I asked a lot of questions for inquiry, framed how more recent imperial history shaped culture, understood my privileges in positioning, and continued conversations for dialog. This did not always go well, and on some occasions, I had to take a step away to get my bearings after getting flustered by communication gaps. Through all the adversity, however, something amazing happened where students from 11 countries and many more backgrounds were able to come together and solve problems better than anyone could do alone.

I hope to carry these learnings to my career, where I want to work on the global stage with people from around the world. Sometimes the intercultural work will be hard, but the reward of something interculturally unique is too good to pass up.

I honestly see the Grand Challenges Scholars Program and other similar engineering enhancement programs as an indispensable resource to students. They offer a realistic look at the world after college that is not solely technical but fraught with interdisciplinary, intercultural, and ethical complexities.

My largest critique for the program is that it should not focus on the 14 Grand Challenges. While this seems counter-intuitive as the challenges are the bases of the program, I believe it limits the students who go through the program.

A vast majority of those who go through the program will not work in the field of the 14 Grand Challenges. If the challenges are the bases of the program, it could be argued the program was for naught. I would argue, however, that by learning the competencies required to tackle the Grand Challenges, one can approach any set of challenges with a greater ability than a traditional student.

This restriction within the program to only focusing on the 14 Grand Challenges leads to a narrowness of mindsets. Here scholars mark progress on the challenges as a success for their time in the program. For many, this benchmark will never be met as they do not go into Grand Challenge fields. But there still is a net positive as students who graduate from the program enter the engineering workforce and bring grand challenges competencies to the whole workforce. Take the oil industry, which is in opposition to the Grand Challenge of making solar power economical. It could then be argued if a scholar were to join the oil industry, it would be a failure of the program. I believe this is not true as the scholar brings their Grand Challenges competencies to the oil industry and can make a viable change in the industry for good. With the 14 Challenges as a benchmark for success, it is difficult for scholars to realize they have this power and can make real success outside of the 14.

I believe the National Academy of Engineering should move away from the 14 Challenges and instead focus on the 5 Pillars. The Grand Challenges would be used more as case studies, but the emphasis on benchmark success should be on using the 5 five pillars to solve problems. These pillars promise to change the way 21st-century engineers do their work radically, as engineering expands pass the technical and offers more robust complete solutions. The 14 Challenges were created to usher in a new technical revolution, but perhaps the revolution should not be caused by the 14 challenges but by the skills needed to tackle them.