Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering MIME Capstone Communication Inventory: What You Said—And How It Helps ME/IE 497 October 26, 2010

Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering CI Helps with Program Assessment Feedback on your preparation as engineering communicators Insights on what’s missing and how we can address those things

Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering What can we count on for external preparation? Required comm. course preparation may not be predictable and consistent

Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering How do you think you’ve progressed?

Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering How does your current skill set fall short?

Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering CI Helps Us Know Where You’re Going — And what you’re expecting when you get there Information on career objectives How you think communication factors into those careers Allows us to help calibrate your expectations with reality (if needed)

Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering Grad school?

Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering Careers? All over the map I'm looking to get on at NuScale Power, and hope to eventually leverage that experience into the commercial space industry - eventually I'd like to start up an asteroid mining company. I am committed to entering the field of systems integration and controls engineering. I plan to go to Wah Chang to be an industrial engineer in their Continuous Improvement Department. I would like to focus in alternative energy for motor vehicles. Honda interests me because of their cutting edge hydrogen fuel cell technology. I also applied for a position at Tesla motors [which] manufactured one of the worlds first all electric sports cars. I hope to enter the medical field of engineering. I'm interested in a few fields: -Renewable Energy -Winery Design -Brewery Design. I plan on pursuing a career that will allow me to employ my skills as an IE. This could include being employed as an engineer in some sort of production facility or as a process engineer in healthcare/business. Management is a goal of mine as well. I hope to work in Material Science and possibly become a professor.

Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering How much of your workday will you spend on communication tasks?

Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering What does the research say? “Numerous studies corroborate the claim that engineers spend a majority of their time communicating … Estimates usually range from 40 to 66% of their work time … but may be as high as 75% “ ( Tenopir & King 2004) “Many engineers spend over 40% of their work time writing, and usually find the percentage increases as they move up the corporate ladder. “ (Beer & McMurrey 2005) Typical estimates of more than 350 engineers of amount of time spent in writing (Silyn-Roberts 1998) Level of seniority% time spent writing Within 2–3 yrs of graduationAbout 30% Middle management50–70% Senior management70% or more; some as much as 95% “Employers need to know that 64 percent of the salaries they expend on newly graduated engineers pays for their communication skills, not their [technical] competencies.” ElementAvg. % time Writing32 Oral presentations10 Other oral discussions22 Total64% Average time working in teams: 32% (Sageev and Romanowski 2001, p. 687, reporting on a survey of SUNY-Buffalo engineering alums)

Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering Engineering notebooks— What’s the point?

Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering CI Helps You Prioritize Needs for Additional Comm. Skills Development Here’s a very small sampling of your wide-ranging communication goals for this course: Improve my skills at writing objective, informative, and interesting engineering reports, specifically focusing on the start and organization of these reports. Learn better collaboration techniques when writing a document with several coworkers. Focus on the sentence structure and be sure to communicate one point at a time. Gain a better understanding of when to cite information and correct usages of different citing methods. Generate a report that is engaging to the intended audience and the details within the report align to the audience knowledge level. Improve on my transitions from tropic to topic when giving an oral presentation. When a problem or question arises, I would like to be more confident in communicating with my supervisor/ adviser.

Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering So now, what about the follow-through? Take a minute or two to think back on the goals you set and the strategies you came up with for achieving them. Have you actually done anything about them yet? If not, when are you going to start? If you want feedback on how you’re doing with the things you’re working on, all you have to do is ask!

Open minds. Open doors. TM School of Mechanical, Industrial, & Manufacturing Engineering Works Cited Beer, D., & McMurrey, D A Guide to Writing as an Engineer. New York: Wiley. Sageev, P. & Romanowski, C.J A message from recent engineering graduates in the workplace: Results of a survey on technical communication skills. J. Engineering Education 90 (4), p Silyn-Roberts, H Using engineers’ characteristics to improve report writing instruction. J. Prof. Issues in Engineering Education and Practice, 124 (1), pp Tenopir, C., & King, D.W Communication Patterns of Engineers. New York: IEEE Press, Wiley Interscience.