Engineering the Future Workforce

The future of tech-related disciplines lies in an interdisciplinary approach to teaching. Professor Stephan Simons believes that industrial, electric, and mechatronics engineers shall find their way into working together.  Stephan is an electrical engineer; he has a major in Control Theory and a Ph. D. in Robotics. He worked in medical technology for more than 11 years, where he developed some of...

Interns are the future full-time workforce so it is important to provide them with responsibility for projects that are impactful for the current and future innovation they will be working on.  In this episode of Innovation In The Classroom, Susanne Barnsteiner, an industrial engineering intern and graduate student at the University of Applied Sciences in Kempten, Germany, details the projects tha...

The global pandemic has caused most industries, including engineering, to adapt, adjust, and innovate their digitization techniques. On today’s episode of Innovation in the Classroom, I am joined by two engineering industry professionals, Michelle Boucher and Sirin Tekinay.   Michelle Boucher is the VP of Research for Engineering Practices at Tech-Clarity and Sirin Tekinay is the Dean of the Colle...

Staying relevant in technology is important now more than ever, especially for an Information Systems professor at the university level, like Sabine Matook. Sabine grew up in Germany where she studied Information Technologies and has since gained prestige as an Information Systems professor of 16 years at the University of Queensland in Australia. She teaches thousands of students the fundamentals...

Do you remember the first time you looked up at the night sky after learning that those tiny twinkling lights were actually giant glowing spheres of hot gas? What was going through your young mind when you learned that other planets existed, so far away from Earth that we could only wonder through the eye of a telescope what they were like? It’s the youthful bewilderment of moments like these, the...

How do you know what you’re supposed to do outside of college?  When students prepare to graduate from college, entering the workforce can be daunting. Sometimes it feels like you know it all, and other times you might not even know where to start. That’s why CAPSTONE classes, SAE groups, and Formula SAE competition groups are so important. These competitive design series involves designing buildi...

Everyone starts their engineering career at different places in life.  Levi Zima, for example, got started at a very young age. His childhood was surrounded by technology. He even used Siemens’ CAD software Solid Edge at the age of seven. As he continued to grow up, he was given more and more opportunities to work in the engineering and wireless industries. Today, he’s a student at the University...

Oftentimes, engineering classes focus solely on the hard skills of manufacturing.  But what about the soft skills?  More and more often, employers and professors are finding that students need to sharpen their soft skills to be successful in the workplace, such as having tough conversations, learning to be collaborative, and how to redirect behaviors that are not productive on collaborative teams....

800 years ago, the purpose of getting a university-level education was vastly different from what it’s become today. Back then, everybody was seen as a generalist. Now, everyone is hyper-specialized in one or two areas, yet many are not able to recover from the inevitabilities of disruption.  The only way to offset disruption in employability is by helping students understand humans. To make real...

Most engineering students learn from hands-on experiences, but more often than not the only “experiences” they get are classroom lectures.  This is why Parikshit Borgowda, a graduate student engineer, is driving changes in the engineering curriculum at a top university. He integrates practical examples and real-world applications to drive change on campus. He developed an entire crash course for s...

As a student, you want to get as much knowledge as you can, before actually going into the workforce, but not many Universities offer you this chance. The University of Cincinnati is one of the only colleges in the United States that has co-op programs and gives the students the possibility of graduating with two and a half years of work experience. Through the Academic Partnership Program, Siemen...

The college world is filled with organizations that try to provide development opportunities for the students, and BEST is no exception. They try to provide complimentary education through different courses, they have competitions that connect students with real-world challenges, and every year, they hold events to raise awareness on the importance of learning. Antonia Nanau is the former presiden...