Good morning

Fall, 2003 Engineering Orientation

Faculty Address by John K. Bennett

Associate Dean of Engineering for Education

University of Colorado at Boulder

August 20, 2003

Thank you. Good morning. As I prepared over the summer to speak with you, it was with some trepidation that I asked myself, “What could I possibly have to say to this assembly that would be more important than the extra sleep that you might have enjoyed instead?” For one thing that I have come to learn is that true happiness often depends on simply getting enough sleep. So, to those of you who may find my remarks unrewarding, I apologize in advance, and I won’t think ill of you if you doze off. Let me also apologize in advance to the parents and family members present this morning. While you are indeed most welcome, my remarks this morning are primarily for the entering Class of 2007 -- or 2008 -- or whatever. I would also like to acknowledge that in preparing my remarks, I have, with permission, borrowed heavily from advice once offered in similar circumstances by my good friend Professor John Hutchinson.

Let me begin by adding my voice to the many that have greeted you here at the University of Colorado. It is my privilege to represent the faculty of the College of Engineering and Applied Science in welcoming you. This welcome is not at all gratuitous. Your presence here is vital to the life of the University. Without the intellectual renewal that stems from the active engagement between our students, on the one hand, who are driven by curiosity, filled with wonder, and who bring a fresh and challenging perspective to their education; and our faculty, on the other hand, who are dedicated to the disciplines in which they have studied and taught for many years, this university would wither. What makes CU Boulder a special place to work, and what inspires me daily, is not the excellent scholarship of the faculty, nor the talented staff, nor the beautiful campus, or even the inviting mountains on the horizon. Rather, what makes this university a place that I want to be is the quality of the people who come here to study and live -- people like you. Let me tell you a little about yourselves:

There are a total of 655 of you;
More than half of you (about 63 %) are from Colorado;
Your average high school GPA was 3.7;
Your average SAT and ACT scores are well into the 90^th percentile, and in fact your average verbal scores are higher than those of the English majors enrolled on the other side of campus.
564 of you are male. 91 of you, not quite 14 %, are female -- sorry ladies, but I promise you that we are working hard on this important issue.
Less than 1 percent of you plan to major in applied math;
Five and one half percent of you are prospective architectural engineers;
Almost 15 percent of you are prospective aerospace engineers;
About 6 percent of you are prospective chemical and biological engineers;
14 percent of you are prospective computer scientists;
Nearly 4 percent of you are prospective civil and environmental engineers;
Five percent of you are prospective electrical engineers;
Eight and one half percent of you are prospective electrical and computer engineers;
A little more than 1 percent of you plan to major in engineering physics;
Less than 1 percent of you are prospective environmental engineers;
Eight and one half percent of you are prospective mechanical engineers; and
Almost one third of you are open option students, having mastered one of life’s lessons that indecision is the key to flexibility. I will have more to say about this in a moment.

Some of you are the first person in your family to attend college. I can only say that our pleasure in your presence here today pales in comparison to the pride and joy that you have brought your parents. Well done!

This morning I would like to offer a few thoughts on the nature and purpose of your undergraduate education in engineering and applied science at CU, and I will go so far as to offer both some general and some specific advice. Like all such moralizing, my opinions and advice have been shaped by my personal experience, first as an undergraduate like you, and later as an educator. Let me tell you a little of that experience. When I left rural Arkansas to go to college, I had never seen the campus of the university I had chosen to attend. My choice of university was dictated by simple criteria: it was the best university that I could find that didn’t have an application fee. It would be kind to say that I was not well read, and that I had no discernable study skills. What I did have was a burning passion to be an electrical engineer. For as long as I could remember, electricity and electronics had fascinated me. I had taken apart every electrical appliance and piece of equipment in our home in order to try to understand how it worked. In almost every case, I was able to return the item in question to working order, usually with only a few parts left over. My favorite activity as a child (really, I’m not making this up!) was to be taken to the local junkyard so that I could salvage electronics parts from cars and discarded household items, which I would then take home and solder together into various dangerous electrical devices.

I suspect that some of the students among you are starting to get worried, and some of parents among you are starting to have second thoughts about whether you really want to entrust your child’s education to such a pathetic geek. But, you see, the story doesn’t end there. In my first year of college, I underwent an intellectual transformation - not from the math, chemistry and physics courses, which were every bit as difficult for me as you might expect, but rather from a required course in the humanities. There, under the patient mentoring of one extraordinary English professor, I learned to read and think critically, to write clearly, and to love literature. When I think of all of the experiences that have shaped my intellect, nothing else comes close to that one course taken my freshman year.

This brings me to the first of a few general themes this morning. Life offers, at least to we humans, few opportunities to undergo metamorphosis. You are presently blessed to be at one of those times – be sure to take full advantage of the opportunity. You come here a product of your K-12 education, your family heritage and upbringing, and approximately 25,000 hours of MTV. Someone other than that person will occupy your body when you graduate. You will be transformed by the people, events and scholarship that will shape your undergraduate career. The choices that you make in the next four years, and the things that you make part of your life, will characterize the nature of that transformation. This is a thrilling experience – and I mean thrilling in the sense of both exciting and a little scary – for all of us.

What will you make of this extraordinary opportunity? How will you make these critical choices? My first, and I believe most important, bit of advice for you is, to quote national Professor of the Year Dennis Huston, that you “study what you love”. Find subject matter that brings you wonder, excitement, and joy, about which you have passion, and pursue it with all of the energy that you can muster. Your parents cannot make this choice for you, nor can any of us here at CU. We can help, if you let us, but ultimately, this choice is yours alone.

Many of you will approach this task with some degree of trepidation. This is natural. Dealing with the future, and dealing with the fear that contemplating the future creates, is always a challenge. Ask yourself why you came to college, and ask yourself what you expect to get out of college. Now ask yourself whether you can disconnect these ideas from the need to get a job sometime in the future. Is there any one of you who can genuinely say that you have no anxiety about getting a job or getting into graduate or professional school after college? The pressure generated by that fear is immense and consuming. And even more painfully, it is often compounded by unrelenting expectations from parents, friends and family. Faced with this pressure, students often turn their CU experiences into little more than ritualized vocational education. You take the courses you are told to take, you read what you are told to read, you solve the problems you are given to solve. Each course becomes simply another in a series of hurdles in a long and arduous march to graduation and the future. There is little sense of accomplishment, even less sense of satisfaction, and no sense of success. I have seen students terrified to make a B, even on a single exam. I have seen students terrified to drop courses that they find painfully unrewarding and uninteresting. Far too many students remain trapped in a course of study and a major, disinterested and disenchanted with the material, pursuing a degree they don’t really want, all from fear of an uncertain future and from fear of failing both their own expectations and the demands of others.

Do not fall into this trap; study what you love.

One of my favorite movies is “Field of Dreams.” Field of Dreams came out in 1989, so I suspect that many of you have never seen it, and to those of you I highly recommend that you rent it some evening. Field of Dreams is a magical story of a young Iowa corn farmer named Ray, who plows under his crop to build a dream field where baseball players from an earlier age can return to play the game they love. In one of my favorite scenes, the great Shoeless Joe Jackson tells Ray, “I used to wake up in the morning with the smell of the ball park in my nose, the cool of the grass on my feet. Have you ever held a glove to your face just to take in the smell? I would’ve played this game for food money. To hear the sound of the crowd, watching them rise as one when a ball is hit deep… I would’ve played this game for nothing.”

John Hoyt, President of the Humane Society, once said: “Figure out what you care about and live a life that shows it.” Your goal, then, should be to figure out what you care about, to find the game that you would play for nothing. How will you go about this important undertaking? Let me presume to offer a few suggestions, which I will summarize in two words: Take risks.

Don’t be afraid to explore. Flip through the course catalog and sign up for a few courses simply because they sound interesting. Take classes about which you know nothing – I once followed a pretty English major to an upper-level class on Milton. It turned out that I was the only engineer in the class. While things didn’t work out with the pretty English major, I stayed in the class, took two others, and as a result, developed a lifelong love of Renaissance literature. So, while I would not recommend that you base your choice of classes upon the appearance of your classmates, I do urge you to be adventurous in your selection of courses, especially elective courses.

Take advantage of the offerings of the Herbst Program in the Humanities. These are small discussion-oriented sections covering a wide range of literature, art and music, available primarily to engineers (which means that you won’t get bumped by an English major).

To the extent possible, choose courses offered by great teachers, whatever those courses may be. A great teacher will make their subject compelling, and you will be richer for the experience. Here at CU we have a culture of excellence in teaching, so it should be easy to find a wide selection of courses that are offered by exceptional teachers. Take some of them.

Try to match your choices with your goals. Imagine the kind of life that you would like to lead in ten years. How do you see yourself?

Head of prestigious research team? Perhaps.
President of your own engineering firm? Perhaps.
Your picture on the cover of Fortune Magazine? Perhaps.
Your own reality TV show? I hope not.
A respected teacher? Would that more of you shared this vision.
A rewarding job that you enjoy? Definitely.

OK, what skills do you need to achieve this vision? What knowledge do you need in order to succeed? Now, does your course selection this semester match your vision? If not, why not?

Don’t be afraid to change your mind about courses, or your major, or even to not have a definite major (Sorry parents, but this is really OK, at least for a while). Remember, that for a while, indecision is the key to flexibility. Enjoy it while you can. I once received a call from a student at 3:00 AM, who in a very concerned voice said, “Dr. Bennett, I really need to talk; can I come over to see you?” Expecting some horrible personal or family tragedy, I got up, dressed, prepared for the worst, and went down to my office ready to marshal all of the formidable resources of the university to assist this student in his time of need, whatever that need turned out to be. When Shawn arrived, he came into my office, sat down, and said “Dr. Bennett, I’ve been thinking of changing my major”. I looked at my watch, shrugged and said “OK Shawn, what do you have in mind”. We talked for most of the rest of night. Just to be clear, I am not encouraging you to call me in the middle of the night if you want to change your major. But I do encourage you to reflect on the academic choices that you make while you are here, and I would be happy to talk to you anytime the coffee cart is serving.

I urge you to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunities for CU undergraduate engineering students to participate in design and research. In addition to the strong commitment of the faculty, we are blessed with two absolutely unique facilities that support those activities: the Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory and the recently-completed Discovery Learning Center. In the Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory you will find world-class facilities where undergraduate students design and fabricate projects from rockets to robots. In the Discovery Learning Center you will find vertically integrated research projects, where undergraduate students work on cutting-edge research from molecular engineering to distributed computing. There are a wealth of opportunities to participate in design and research projects at CU. For example, I am currently working with an interdisciplinary team of undergraduate students whose goal is to build an autonomous, speech-capable, mobile robot. Some of you have seen the Solar Decathlon House on display on the other side of the Engineering Center. The house, which was also designed by an interdisciplinary team of students, was last on display on the mall in Washington DC, where it won first place honors in national competition. Perhaps you will want to work with the Space Grant Consortium, where you can help design and build satellite payloads that actually get put into orbit. Perhaps you will want to help design, build and drive the SAE race car. Or perhaps you will come up with your own project, and pursue this work in an independent study course with a faculty member. All of these options, and many more like them, are available to you simply for the asking.

I would also encourage you to remember that you chose to attend a university, not a technical college. Although the focus of your scholarship here will be engineering or applied science, I hope that you will always remember this important fact. If your interests happen to include both rocket design and renaissance literature, at CU we can challenge your intellect in both areas.

I urge you to seek out project courses. At many engineering schools, prospective majors typically face two years of math, chemistry, physics, and other engineering fundamentals before they ever get to do any real engineering. While these fundamentals are important, they do not fairly represent what the practice of engineering is all about. At CU, project courses like GEEN 1400, ECEN 1400 and a host of others, allow you to experience the practice of engineering, and the joy of creative design, without the two-year wait. They also help you to develop some of the essential teamwork and leadership skills that will serve you well throughout your career.

I encourage you to explore opportunities for what we call service learning. There are a host of such opportunities at CU. You might want to join the student chapter of Engineers Without Borders, which was founded by CU Engineering Professor Bernard Amadei; or you could investigate Engineering for Developing Communities; or you can see what’s up with the Institute for Women and Technology; or help build a house with Habitat for Humanity; or join the ITLL Outreach Corps, where students volunteer to teach engineering principles to high school students in area schools; or provide help to your classmates; or any of the host of opportunities to individually and collectively use your engineering skills to give a little something back.

Finally, I encourage you to take advantage of opportunities that allow you to develop important non-engineering skills: speaking, writing, leading a group. There are many such opportunities, including quite a few that do not involve course work.

My second general piece of advice is that you take full advantage of your time at the University of Colorado. In addition to your technical education, there are some things that I believe that everyone should do before they leave. This brings me to a bit of specific advice, call it “Bennett’s List of Things to do Before You Graduate.” Some of these are specific to CU or to Boulder; some are not. In no particular order, here they are:

Learn how to design a rocket, a building, a bridge, a car, a new cell line and a computer. Actually build one of these.
Have breakfast at Lucille’s.
Learn how to make a soufflé at altitude.
Learn how to make Hollandaise sauce (some of you may be sensing an affinity for food in this list, and you would be correct, but let me move on).
Help build a Habitat for Humanity house.
Climb at least one “fourteener”.
Learn how to design and construct a web site.
Run the Bolder Boulder.
Learn to speak a foreign language well.
Find five authors of fiction that you like, and read everything they have written.
Keep reading fiction even when you don’t have time.
Go abroad, preferably to a non-English-speaking country.
Learn how to solder and how to weld.
Fall in love. If you get dumped, get over it, and fall in love again.
Take Elspeth Dusinberre’s “Trash and Treasure” course.
Learn to write and speak well.
Learn to sleep anywhere, at any time.
Learn how to drive a bulldozer.
Take care of someone who needs help.
Learn how to prepare and pour concrete.
Find a form of artistic expression that you enjoy -- painting, playing an instrument, singing, weaving, sculpting, or whatever -- and regularly spend some time in this activity.
Expand your tastes in music.
Act in or work on an amateur theater production.
Find a form of athletic activity or exercise that you enjoy and stay with it. Join the Rec Center.
Find a place that you can be alone and go there from time to time.
And last, but certainly not least, learn how to separate your laundry, so that all of your clothes don’t become roughly the same color as those new burgundy towels that your mother bought you for college.

My third theme this morning is that you deserve to be here. Some of you will at some point in the near future come to the conclusion that the Admission’s Office has somehow made a mistake, and that everyone here is smarter than you, or better prepared than you, or both smarter and better prepared than you. Let me assure you in advance that each one of you were carefully selected, that each one of you deserves to be here, and that each one of you will thrive at CU if you will put to good use the intellect and personal traits that got you here. The challenge is of course believing this truth about yourself. Because many, if not most, of you will find yourselves struggling in the next few months in ways that are unfamiliar to you. The homework will be more abstract and less direct, the exams will seem more obscure, almost obtuse, and somehow unrelated to the homework. Your professors’ assessments of your work will seem harsher, and your grades… well, let’s just say that I’ve known quite a few students who were disappointed by their first exam grades.

So why do students so often struggle in their first semesters at CU? I can assure you that it is not because the faculty are uncaring or unfair. The opposite is true: your instructors will want you to succeed and will make every effort to help you. The reason for such difficulty is something different all together: the skills you brought with you from high school, and which served you so well there, are not the skills you will need here. Think back carefully about what your high school taught you, and two primary skills come to mind: how to consume information and how to solve problems. These are valuable skills and you are all very talented at them; that’s part of what got you here. But here, our goals are different: we seek not so much to change what you know but rather how you know. By doing so, we hope to liberate you to choose for yourself what to think and how to think. We want you to think critically, analytically, creatively, expansively. We want you to learn to construct knowledge for yourself. This is clearly a worthy challenge, and although it might not be the challenge you expected, remember that you chose to be here. So how will you respond?

Faced with this challenge, many students begin to suffer extreme doubts about their abilities, their intellect, and their chances of survival. These doubts are made worse by the feeling that you are the only one struggling. But you are not alone, not really. Almost everyone struggles during their first year or two. It’s just that almost no one talks about it. My advice to you is four-fold.

First and foremost, be patient with yourself. Remember that you are developing a new skill, a new way of thinking, a deeper way of analyzing and understanding. Give yourself time to adjust. My experience is that students who have difficulty early on do quite well in the long run. I have observed a transition in my students that occurs as they develop these new skills. That transition will come for you too. Be patient.

Second, talk about the challenges you face and the difficulties you have. Go to see your professors, ask for assistance and insight. Talk with your academic advisors and others whose judgment you trust. Talk to each other, form study groups, work together, share your experiences.

Third, believe in yourself. Don’t judge yourself on the basis of your early exam scores. Many students are all too quick to conclude that a low test grade or two is an indicator both of lack of ability and of lack of a successful future at CU. This isn’t true. With time, I assure you, your grades will rise and you will make it.

Finally, sometimes engineering is just hard work. You might not especially enjoy it at the time, but once in while you will simply need to hunker down and bust your ass in order to succeed.

The final thought that I would like to leave with you this morning is that your education here will afford you the opportunity to make a real difference. Engineering is fundamentally about using technology to solve societal problems and to serve human need. This is a high calling. The problems facing us as a society -- facing you, as individuals -- are incredibly complex, and they are legion. At its core, engineering is an intensely creative process. We need to bring that creativity to bear.

I hope that in the next four years you find an undertaking about which you have passion; a way to make a real difference. For some of you that passion will be education; others: invention, still others: leadership. I hope that you will become a passionate engineer, and that you truly will make a difference. I hope that you will be inventive, and that you will lead when leadership is called for. I dearly hope that some of you will choose to become educators. But most of all, I hope that you find the game you would play for nothing.

Welcome to the University of Colorado!