Technical and professional communication for chemical engineers

Abstract

Good communication skills are vital for any career. Engineers are often stigmatized as being poor communicators, and while this is merely a stereotype, many engineers and STEM students do express disinterest in writing and other forms of communication. While communication is incorporated in many undergraduate chemical engineering courses through laboratory reports, presentations, and informal short answer questions, these items are generally evaluated for their technical accuracy, not on aspects of their delivery and presentation. In the chemical engineering department of a large Midwestern university, students are required to take two courses in writing and communication. The first is a general English course, the second is an elective. While technical communication is an option for this elective, so are courses in fairy-tale literature or the writings of various ethnicities. Thus, students are not explicitly required to take a course in technical communication, but rather expected to gain these skills needed for their professional careers through other coursework and external experiences. Other departments at the same institution offer discipline-specific courses in technical communication, and informal observations of the communication skills of senior-level students have suggested that our department may benefit from such a course. In Spring 2014, we piloted an undergraduate course, Technical and Professional Communication for Chemical Engineers, and with its success the course is currently being offered in Spring 2015. Course focus is on all aspects of communication, verbal (written and oral), non-verbal (body language and development of visuals), and professional skills (e.g., resume development, e-mail writing). The format of the course is heavily active and inquiry-based learning, with short lectures guiding the 80 minute sessions. A typical session generally consists of a warm-up activity that gauges the student perceptions and knowledge of the topic of interest, then a brief lecture and discussion on the topic, followed by a second activity that allows the students to practice the concepts discussed in the lecture portion. This model was adopted based on the expectation that students will enter the course with varying schemata regarding communication, each derived from varied individual experiences. The warm-up activity not only gets the students engaged in the topic from the start of class, but also serves as a guide for the lecture and discussion. Student responses to the course indicate that this is a high-value offering applicable for any chemical engineering student regardless of intended career path, and we look to establish this as a permanent course in the department. If and when the course enrollment becomes large enough, we are interested in comparing communication skills of students who have taken the course versus those who have not, through the addition of a communication specific evaluation of artifacts students are already required to develop in other department courses (the aforementioned items where evaluation is generally focused on technical accuracy). In this paper, we provide an outline of the course and student outcomes from the first offering.