Preparing First-Year Engineering Students for a Career where Communication Skills Matter

Abstract

and a member of the first-year engineering team. The focus of this team is on providing a consistent, comprehensive, and constructive educational experience that endorses the student-centered, professional and practiceoriented mission of Northeastern University. She teaches the Cornerstone of Engineering courses to firstyear students as well as courses within the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. She is a recent recipient of the Outstanding Teacher of First-Year Students Award and is interested in research that compliments and informs her teaching.

Design of an ECE Technical Communication Course for Accelerating Engineering Careers

“…The survey results described in this paper echo the findings and position in [1,7,9,16]. In this paper, we expand the work in [2,4,6,8,10,11,12,13] by developing a technical communication class for ECE undergraduate senior students on how to effectively deliver the types of oral and written communication reports specifically required by major high-tech companies, targeting different audiences including technical audience, business audience and customers in the industry.…”

“…The ability to communicate effectively is a crucial skill for today's engineers and the ABET curricular initiative reflects this requirement [9,16]. A complete evidence-based paper describes the techniques used in the project based first-year Cornerstone of Engineering course to address the need for building communication skills for first-year engineering students [10]. Even though this skill can be taught and assessed, the results of past surveys show that engineering students are inadequately equipped to meet this need.…”

Cornerstone to Capstone Engineering Design: Evolving Student Perspectives through the Academic Journey with Implementable Curricular Implications

“…Shuman et al classified professional skills into two categories to examine them better: process skills, such as communication, teamwork, and the ability to recognize and resolve ethical dilemmas, and awareness skills, such as understanding the impact of global and social factors, knowledge of contemporary issues, and the ability to do lifelong learning [9]. Communication itself can be divided into three primary categories: Graphical communication, which covers technical requirements of sketching, drawing, and visual skills; oral/spoken communication, which includes formal presentations of the material to a technical audience and communicating with colleagues inside and outside of the organization, and written communication in all forms from report writing, letters, and memos to proper etiquette in emails [10].…”