Parents often ask me whether it is best to steer their children into STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math). I suggest that it is best for them to help their child as the child needs to decide what is right for them. Parents should be an “advisory board”. They can give their children the tools and experiences to assist them in this discovery process, inspire and support them to create an envisioned future, and let them make their own choices.
Develop a passion
The tools and experience include exposure to STEM, arts, trades, sales, humanities, sports, and other activities; support to discover their strengths, investigate their strength areas, develop their passions, and inspire to love learning.
Note I used “develop their passion” rather than “find their passion.” Over the years, I became passionate about many things that I would not have discovered, such as leadership, helping students explore careers, technological stewardship, and promoting STEM. These were areas where I have some natural strengths and found that I can offer some unique insights that benefit people.
Your child may fall head over heels in love with an activity that engrosses them—something that lights them up and makes their heart sing. Do not stop here. There may be other things that light their fire. Your support can help them develop their passion area and then discover who may benefit from and pay for it. Spending all the time on their first passion often eliminates opportunities for them to learn and develop other passions. If they happy to be lucky and their first passion is it, they can always circle back to it.
Passion built on commitment, mastery, and pride is the key to a satisfying career. Mastery is much easier if it aligns with your behavioral strengths. When students discover that they have an exceptional talent, it is incredibly motivating. They will want to go deeper.
Most kids do not get enough exposure to STEM — they are not able to make an informed decision about whether a STEM career is right for them. So, I promote STEM. I recommend that they have at least two significant exposure to STEM, outside the classroom every year from K-12. By telling your child what to study, they may treat education as a chore, instead of embracing the opportunity to discover. Too often options are eliminated far too young. Keep all career options on the table to age 16.
Our assessment data on thousands of people shows that there is no material difference by gender about who will succeed in engineering. Today only 12 percent of engineers are women. Over half of Canada’s high schooler who choose to study engineering have a close relative who is an engineer. Thus, I suspect the gender imbalance in engineering is likely to continue. We need intentional action to help more girls become passionate about engineering and what it can do for our world.
At 16, our behavioral traits are defined, almost hard-wired. We can determine the teen’s natural strengths. We then show them where high performers use these strengths in specific roles. Your teen can explore these opportunities and speak with people who have careers in that area. At 16, students should start to focus and framing their envisioned future.
Integrated learning experiences improve educational and career outcomes
The National Academy of Engineering recent publication, The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education provides profound insights and recommendations. The report examines the evidence behind the assertion that educational programs that integrate learning experiences in the humanities and arts with science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) lead to improved educational and career outcomes. It explores evidence about the value of integrating curricula and experiences in the arts and humanities into college and university STEMM education programs.
Vivek Wadhwa, Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, College of Engineering, builds a compelling case why liberal arts and the humanities are as important as engineering.
Earlier in his academic career, Dr. Wadhwa advised students to focus on science and engineering, believing that this education was a prerequisite for success in business. That was in the era of technology when Bill Gates made assertions that America needed to spend its limited education budgets on these disciplines because they produced the most jobs, rather than the liberal arts and humanities.
In 2008, his research teams at Duke and Harvard surveyed 652 U.S.-born chief executives and heads of product engineering at 502 technology companies and found:
- 92% - bachelor’s degrees
- 47% - higher degrees
- 37% - degrees in engineering or computer technology
- 2% - degrees in mathematics
- 53% - degrees in fields as diverse as business, accounting, healthcare, and arts and the humanities
- 8% - no degree
Dr. Wadhwa learned that though a degree made a big difference in the success of an entrepreneur. The field it was in and the school that it was from were not significant factors. Here are some high-profile examples:
- Susan Wojcicki, YouTube chief executive, majored in history and literature
- Slack founder Stewart Butterfield majored in English
- Airbnb founder Brian Chesky majored in fine arts
- Jack Ma, Alibaba chief executive, has a bachelor’s in English
It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing, and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.” - Steve Jobs
With a focus on the importance of liberal arts and humanities, Jobs built the most valuable company in the world and set new standards for the technology industry.
It was through relentlessly focusing on design in every product the company built; that engineering is important but what makes a technology product most successful is its design.” - Logitech CEO Bracken Darrell
Darrell, who majored in English, answering the question “What caused Logitech’s stock price to increase by 450% over five years?”
Engineering Education or Training Engineers?
I recall speaking with Marc Christensen, the Dean of Engineering at Texas Christian University (TCU). I was trying to discover how TCU had been so successful in creating near gender balance in their engineering programs for more than a decade. I asked if TCU had many of the things to are cited as essential to correcting gender balance. (i.e., a high proportion of faculty who are women, the way they sell engineering to prospective students, extra support for female students, women in leadership positions in the faculty, etc.) — none of these were a focus at TCU.
So, I dug deeper. Dr. Christensen thought the change was a result of a strategic plan about 15 years earlier. The strategy team asked themselves — “Are we trading engineers or providing and engineering education?”
They decided that their focus need to be to provide an engineering education. Engineering is broad and inclusive. It goes far beyond technical competence in a field, familiarity with industry standards, and an acquaintance with computers and IT. An engineering education inspires a passion for learning, problem identification and problems solving, systems thinking – everything impacts everything else, logic, structure, modeling, teamwork, social implications, analytical and creative thinking, and an ethical foundation.
“Learning" and "training" are often used interchangeably. The table below shows the differences between the two.
BASIS FOR COMPARISON | TRAINING | EDUCATION |
Meaning | The process of inculcating specific skills in a person is training. | Theoretical learning in the classroom or any institution is education. |
What is it? | It is a method of skill development. | It is a typical form of learning. |
Based on | Practical application | Theoretical orientation |
Perspective | Narrow | Wide |
Involves | Job experience | Classroom learning |
Term | Short term | Long term |
Prepares for | Present job | Future job |
Objective | To improve performance and productivity. | To develop a sense of reasoning and judgment. |
Teaches | Specific task | General concepts |
Training an engineer for professional practice is best done on the job. To practice independently and engineer requires a license. An engineering graduate needs four years of engineering experience to become licensed. The workplace can provide this training. However, it cannot provide the education that the institution will provide.
We tell girls and boys, if you want to have an impact on the significant issues of our time, such as food security, energy security or water security, then do engineering. It is useful. However, we also need to tell these students that engineers also have exciting careers as social innovators, business executives, lawyers, doctors, educators, and many more.
The Hamilton project is one of the free career planning resources we provide for students on our website. It is an interactive tool allowing users to explore career outcomes by major, in 10 years segments. For example, fewer than 10% of Chemical Engineering majors become Chemical Engineers. None of the engineering disciplines listed have more than 20 percent of the graduates practicing in their discipline.
Engineering regulators, accreditation systems, and employers of practicing engineers view engineering education through the training lens. Should you choose to take engineering, I encourage you to find an institution that offers an engineering education rather than simply training engineers. It offers more pathways to many exciting opportunities.
Cultural Disengagement
Using unique longitudinal survey data of students at four colleges, Dr. Erin Cech examined:
- how students’ public welfare beliefs change during their engineering education
- whether engineering programs emphasize engagement
- whether these program emphases are related to students’ public welfare beliefs
Dr. Cech tracked four specific public welfare considerations:
- the importance to students of professional/ethical responsibilities
- understanding the consequences of technology
- understanding how people use machines
- social consciousness
Suggesting a culture of disengagement, she found that the cultural emphases of students’ engineering programs are directly related to their public welfare commitments, and students’ public welfare concerns decline significantly over the course of their engineering education. However, these findings also suggest that if engineering programs can dismantle the ideological pillars of disengagement in their local climates, they may foster more engaged engineers.
A common failure for entrepreneurs is they “live in a vacuum”
They become razor focused on their idea and vision and lose sight of everything that needs to be done. As noted above by Dr. Wadhwa a degree made a big difference in the success of an entrepreneur. However, the field it was in and the school that it was from were not significant factors. I provide further insight on how to build your start-up team for success.
Founding a new organization requires entrepreneur skills along with creative, design, systems, research, marketing, and business expertise. However, it is rare that expert level skills in all these areas exist in one person. Moreover, the lifeblood of any startup is sales, marketing, and general business savvy. Once again, these are often specialized competencies. Being comfortable at shaking hands, giving presentations, attractive prospects, finding funding, and doing market research is rare in one person. More than entrepreneurial skills are needed to keep the entity in business as it finds its feet.
To run an efficient team, you only need three people: a Hipster, a Hacker, and a Hustler. — Rei Inamoto
Successful tech startups excel in two key areas – programming and style. It is a rare thing to have a masterful programmer who is also at the cutting edge of creative image and design. Likewise, it’s rare to find a genius graphic designer who’s also a programming whizz. The best are usually specialists.
The key to good design is a combination of empathy and knowledge of the arts and humanities. Musicians and artists inherently have the highest sense of creativity. You can teach artists how to use software and graphics tools; turning engineers into artists is hard.
STEAM and beyond
Many folks argue that the general addition of an “arts” component to STEM distracts from the focus on the hard sciences. Others say that there needs to be a separation between the arts and sciences to prevent anything taking away from the emphasis on STEM education. The STEAM movement is not about spending 20 percent less time on science, technology, engineering, and math to make room for art.
It is about sparking students’ imagination and helping students innovate through hands-on STEM projects. Moreover, it is about applying creative thinking and design skills to these STEM projects so that students can imagine a variety of ways to use STEM skills into adulthood. For decades I have heard that engineers have excellent technical skills but lack the soft skills.
Let’s come up with a broader acronym than STEAM. How about - THE/HAMS - technology, health & engineering (the functions) / humanities, arts & math & science (the foundation)?
Cognitive diversity
The diversity of ideas and viewpoints—can be compelling and is often what we need to get a team thinking critically. The skill to identify the cognitive difference and tap into that diversity will be a required skill of future leaders. Any perspective—even one that might seem crazy—has the potential to be useful under the right circumstances. However, that doesn’t mean that it will be. The team or its leaders need to discern when it should seriously consider a different way of thinking, and when it’s a waste of time.
The great teams I have been a part of having these skills within the collective talent stack plus more. They also have a big-picture thinker, entrepreneurial skills plus excellent research. This creates the full talent stack and cognitive diversity that are required for success. Here’s a little insight into how to tap into the collective intelligence in the room.
Rules of innovation have changed
A broad range of technologies, such as computing, artificial intelligence, digital medicine, robotics and synthetic biology, are advancing exponentially and converging, making amazing things possible.
With the convergence of medicine, artificial intelligence and sensors, we can create digital doctors that monitor our health and help us prevent disease; with the advances in genomics and gene editing, we can produce plants that are drought resistant and that feed the planet; with robots powered by artificial intelligence, we can build digital companions for the elderly. Nanomaterial advances are enabling a new generation of solar and storage technologies that will make energy affordable and available to all.
Creating solutions such as these requires knowledge of fields such as biology, education, health sciences and human behavior. Tackling today’s most significant social and technological challenges requires the ability to think critically about their human context, which is something that humanities graduates happen to be best trained to do.
Technological stewardship is required to ensure we intentionally consider the ethical considerations and that the technology that serves humanity and not the other way around. Who should own the technological stewardship domain? It is part of the overall responsible stewardship framework. By creating a culture of stewardship, a successful organizational leader empowers everyone in an organization to be both a leader and a steward, regardless of their position in an organizational hierarchy. Thus, leadership through stewardship should be a fundamental aspect of successful organizations, and of our shared culture as citizens of this 21st-century global society.
Let’s all embrace cognitive diversity
To develop a complete mind: Study the art of science; study the science of art. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else” – Leonardo DaVinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, in a small town called Vinci in the Republic of Florence. Leonardo was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer.
An engineering degree is precious, but the sense of empathy that comes from music, arts, literature, and psychology provides a significant advantage in design. A history major who has studied the Enlightenment or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire gains an insight into the human elements of technology and the importance of its usability. A psychologist is more likely to know how to motivate people and to understand what users want more than an engineer who has only worked in the technology trenches. A musician or artist is king in a world in which you can 3D-print anything that you can imagine.
We all cannot be expert in every field. Solving our complex and wicked problems need a community of diverse thinkers. Only by knowing the connectivity, we can realize the wholeness. Only by understanding the wholeness of a thing, we can go beyond and use it with its real potential.
At the Engineering Change Lab, a think tank that brings national and international minds together is committed to creating an engineering community for the future: one that stewards technology to put people and nature first. Melanie Goodchild, Senior Indigenous Research Fellow, and Ambassador, Suncor Fellow, The Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience opened our June 2018 meeting. She is Melanie is Anishinaabe and was speaking about ethical space - the space between two worlds of thought that no one owns, thus allowing people can come together. Ms. Goodchild is a systems thinker who recognizes that everything is connected, She mentioned the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a document that is useful in the space that no one owns when applied with respect.
I found it to be an insightful document. It has many applications for the inclusion of thoughts and views that may be different from our standard frame, whether it be cross culture, generation, discipline, social-economical, and more. Here are a few excerpts from the annex, the UN members affirm that:
- indigenous peoples are equal to all other peoples while recognizing the right of all peoples to be different, to consider themselves different, and to be respected as such
- all peoples contribute to the diversity and richness of civilizations and cultures, which constitute the common heritage of humankind
- all doctrines, policies, and practices based on or advocating superiority of peoples or individuals by national origin or racial, religious, ethnic or cultural differences are racist, scientifically false, legally invalid, morally condemnable and socially unjust
Summary
An engineering education provides an excellent foundation for understanding the world through systems thinking. However, it is not sufficient. A full understanding requires diverse perspectives. Learning about the humanities and arts broadens our thinking. From an individual perspective, it is essential to understand and offer our career capital to be a part of the solution.
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