professor-in-progress

[professor-in-progress]

The Crimes of Individuality and Empathy in Engineering

When I was in my second year of undergrad, I wanted to dye my hair blue - like Ramona Flowers blue. I went to the salon and tried to get it bleached and dyed. Unfortunately, I had been dying my hair with box dyes throughout high school and needed to let the dyed part grow out so the bleach would take. I waited a year and came back to finally get it done.

I loved my blue hair so much. It looked good on me and I got tons of compliments on it. My friends loved it too. Dying my hair has always been my favorite form of self-expression. I’ve been doing it pretty consistently since I was 14. However, it wasn’t lost on me that I was the most easily identifiable person in my college of engineering.

The engineering stereotype isn’t necessarily wrong in my experience. The dominating forces in my program were the stereotypical engineering guys; serious, white, cis-het men with poor social skills and big egos that lead them to dominate in-class discussion. They lead the culture. They defined acceptable behavior. You had to be smart, confident, quiet, serious, proud and your life had to revolve around engineering or else you weren’t supposed to be here. If your life wasn’t dominated by engineering and engineering-adjacent hobbies, you weren’t an engineer.

Professors also seem to subscribe to this belief system. “I’m an engineer. Engineers look like me. These students look like me, so they’re engineers.” The quiet part of this line of thinking is rarely directly said: “You don’t look like me, so you’re not an engineer.”

Obviously, I’m not saying anything revolutionary here. We all know that engineering is dominated by white men. Engineering severely lacks diversity, not just in identity, but also in personality.

I met my friends in my second and third years of undergrad. We were all in the same program and met in class. I joke that we were just collecting as many of the women in our program as we could.  We sat together in class, we studied and did homework together, we hung out outside of class and eventually many of us lived together for the last few years of college.

My friends are like my blue hair. They’re loud and funny and so full of joy and love. They love to play instruments and do crafts and bake and cook and read and write. We go to the renaissance festival every year. We love to throw parties and go to bars and concerts. You could tell when we were around in the engineering buildings. We would laugh and joke and complain and be ourselves as we walked through the halls to class or worked in the engineering lounge.

This wasn’t incredibly welcome behavior by the dominating forces in the program and that was made known very clearly. Many of the men in our program started to make their distaste towards us obvious and oftentimes was even vocalized. We weren’t serious and didn’t spend time working on personal engineering projects as hobbies. Our personalities didn’t change or rely upon our identities as engineers.

If you look at various subreddits related to engineering, you can find examples of people talking about how engineering changed their personality or how they’re having an identity crisis or how they just don’t have an “engineering personality”. I think that engineering culture can either force compliance or breed contempt. Or worse, both.

I think that as people go through engineering programs, and they start to understand and experience the culture, their personalities were either initially compliant to the engineering stereotype or not. If their personalities weren’t compliant, then they would shift to be more compliant or they wouldn’t shift and they would gain contempt towards engineering. In the worst case, someone’s personality shifts and as a result they gain contempt towards engineering culture, taking it out on those who don’t comply.

The last case seems to me to manifest itself most often in minoritized engineering professors. Women engineering professors who embrace the culture seem to tear down their women students, especially those who don’t comply, rather support them. These women seem to embrace and amplify the sexism in engineering culture instead of trying to dismantle it from the inside. Is this internalized misogyny that grows during one’s engineering education? Could this be her way of “getting even” for her own experiences of sexism during college by punching down?

Why don’t we celebrate individuality in engineering? Individuality promotes creativity which we know leads to better engineering design. However, despite numerous engineering programs’ claims to promote creative and diverse engineers, engineering culture prevails, and individuality and nonconformity are punished. We say that we want to promote person-oriented design and create more empathic and ethical engineers, but we socially punish those who embrace the very traits that lead to these ends.

If it wasn’t obvious by the beginning of this post, my experience in undergrad left much to be desired. My friends and I didn’t fit in, and never made an effort to fit in. We were excluded and looked down on by both our peers and our professors, and many of us, including myself, almost dropped out of engineering altogether. Despite this, I’m doing my best not to repeat this cycle as I’ve begun my own teaching journey.

I taught a section of my institution’s first year engineering course this past semester for the first time. I used this opportunity to see if empathy and individuality can have a place within engineering and how effective they can be. I was candid with students about the purpose of assignments and projects. I commiserated with them about problems with the class. I showed them examples of my own massive failures in undergrad and that one semester’s worth of awful grades isn’t the end of the world. You can almost drop out of engineering multiple times and still end up teaching it years later.

Unsurprisingly, this worked! My students’ grades were good; they scored the highest out of all sections on both the midterm and the final exam. Further, my students recognized my efforts and appreciated them. Course evaluations, despite the unpopularity of the class itself, were stellar. It turns out that if you’re honest, friendly, and understanding with students, even engineering students, they recognize that effort and end up performing well. Students, despite how aggravating they can be, are people too. What a revolutionary concept?

Now obviously this is all just a personal anecdote. This wasn’t a properly performed study or anything, but I also don’t think it’s insignificant either. Students recognize when they aren’t being treated with dignity and respect and respond as such. Instead of repeating the behaviors that were performed by my professors during undergrad, I embraced my individuality in teaching and promoted that in my students and many of them thrived.

I think that individuality and empathy are the missing pieces needed to rehabilitate engineering culture. By maintaining and promoting these traits we can build students’ engineering identities without having to sacrifice their personal identities. Further, we can use these traits to promote and embrace diversity within engineering and strengthen engineers’ person-oriented design skills, ultimately improving the lives of everyone.  Why do we criminalize the very tools that we need to embrace in order to thrive?

[professor-in-progress]

Happy Thanksgiving my dad proved my first point that people don't think that engineering is political. idk if I convinced him but he listened to me I suppose

Engineering is Inherently Political

Okay, yea, seemingly loaded statement but hear me out.

In our current political climate (particularly in the Trump/post-Trump era ugh), the popular sentiment is that scientists and other academics are inherently political. So much of science gets politicized; climate change, abortion, gender “issues”, flat earth (!!), insert any scientific topic even if it isn’t very controversial and you can find some political discourse about it somewhere. However, if you were to ask people if they think that engineering is political, I would bet that 9/10 people would say no. The popular perception of engineering is that it’s objective and non-political. Engineering, generally, isn’t very controversial.

I argue that these sentiments should switch.

At its base level, engineering is the application of science and math to solve problems. Tack on the fact that most people don’t really know what engineering is (hell, I couldn’t even really describe it until starting my PhD and studying that concept specifically). Not controversial, right? We all want to solve the world’s problems and make the world a better place and engineers fill that role! But the best way to solve any problem is a subjective issue; no two people will fully agree on the best way to approach or solve a problem.

Why do we associate science and scientists with controversy but engineers with objectivity? Scientists study what is. It’s a scientist’s job to understand our world. Physicists understand how the laws of the universe work, biologists explore everything in our world that lives, doctors study the human body and how it works, environmental scientists study the Earth and its health, I could go on. My point is that scientists discover and tell us what is. Why do we politicize and fear monger about smart people telling us what they discover about the world?

Engineering, however, has a reputation for being logical, objective, result oriented. Which I get, honestly. It’s appealing to believe that the people responsible for designing and building our world are objective and, for the most part, they are. But this is a much more nuanced topic once you think deeper about it.

For example, take my discipline, aerospace engineering. On the surface, how to design a plane or a rocket isn’t subjective. Everyone has the same goal, get people and things from place to place without killing them (yea I bastardized my discipline a bit but that’s basically all it boils down to). Let’s think a little deeper about the implications though. Let’s say you work for a spacecraft manufacturer and let’s hypothetically call it SpaceX. Your rocket is so powerful that during takeoff it destroys the launch pad. That’s an expensive problem so you’re put on the team of engineers dedicated to solving this problem. The team decides that the most effective and least expensive solution is to spray water onto the rocket and launchpad during takeoff. This solution works great! The launchpad stays intact throughout the launch and the company saves money. However, that water doesn’t disappear after launch, and now it’s contaminated with chemicals used in and on the rocket. Now contaminated water flows into the local environment affecting not just the wildlife but also the water supply of the local community. Who is responsible for solving that issue? Do we now need a team of environmental or chemical engineers to solve this new problem caused by the aerospace engineers?

Yes, engineers solve problems, but they also cause problems.

Every action has its reaction. Each solution has its repercussions.

As engineers we possess some of the most dangerous information in the world and are armed with the weapon to utilize it, our minds. Aerospace engineers know how to make missiles, chemical engineers know how to make bombs, computer scientists know how to control entire technological ecosystems. It’s very easy for an engineer to hurt people, and many do. I’m not exempt from this. I used to work for a military contractor, and I still feel pretty guilty about the implications of the problems that I solved. It is an engineer’s responsibility to act and use their knowledge ethically.

Ethical pleas aside, let’s get back to the topic at hand.

Engineering is inherently political. The goal of modern engineering is to avert catastrophe, tackle societal problems, and increase prosperity. If you disagree don’t argue with me, argue with the National Academy of Engineering. It is an engineer’s responsibility to use their knowledge to uplift the world and solve societal problems, that sounds pretty political to me!

An engineer doesn’t solve a problem in a vacuum. Each problem exists within the context of the situation that caused it as well as the society surrounding that situation. An engineer must consider the societal implications of their solutions and designs and aim to uplift that society through their design and solution to the problem. You can’t engineer within a social society without considering the social implications of both the problem and the solution. Additionally, the social implications of those engineering decisions affect different people in different ways. It’s imperative to be aware and mindful of the social inequality between demographics of people affected by both the solution and the problem. For example, our SpaceX company could be polluting the water supply of a poor community that doesn’t have the resources to solve the problem nor the power or influence to confront our multi-billion-dollar company. Now, a multi-billion-dollar company is advancing society and making billions of dollars at the cost of thousands of lives that already struggle due to their social standing in the world. Now the issue has layers that add further social implications that those without money are consistently prone to the whims of those with money. Which, unfortunately, is a step of ethical thought that many engineers don’t tend to take.

Engineers control our world. Engineers decide which problems to solve and how best to solve them. Engineers control who is impacted by those solutions. Engineers have the power to either protect and lift up the marginalized or continue to marginalize them. Those who control the engineers control the world. This is political. This is a social issue.

Now look me in the eyes and tell me that engineering isn’t inherently political.

[professor-in-progress]

Engineering is Inherently Political

Okay, yea, seemingly loaded statement but hear me out.

In our current political climate (particularly in the Trump/post-Trump era ugh), the popular sentiment is that scientists and other academics are inherently political. So much of science gets politicized; climate change, abortion, gender “issues”, flat earth (!!), insert any scientific topic even if it isn’t very controversial and you can find some political discourse about it somewhere. However, if you were to ask people if they think that engineering is political, I would bet that 9/10 people would say no. The popular perception of engineering is that it’s objective and non-political. Engineering, generally, isn’t very controversial.

I argue that these sentiments should switch.

At its base level, engineering is the application of science and math to solve problems. Tack on the fact that most people don’t really know what engineering is (hell, I couldn’t even really describe it until starting my PhD and studying that concept specifically). Not controversial, right? We all want to solve the world’s problems and make the world a better place and engineers fill that role! But the best way to solve any problem is a subjective issue; no two people will fully agree on the best way to approach or solve a problem.

Why do we associate science and scientists with controversy but engineers with objectivity? Scientists study what is. It’s a scientist’s job to understand our world. Physicists understand how the laws of the universe work, biologists explore everything in our world that lives, doctors study the human body and how it works, environmental scientists study the Earth and its health, I could go on. My point is that scientists discover and tell us what is. Why do we politicize and fear monger about smart people telling us what they discover about the world?

Engineering, however, has a reputation for being logical, objective, result oriented. Which I get, honestly. It’s appealing to believe that the people responsible for designing and building our world are objective and, for the most part, they are. But this is a much more nuanced topic once you think deeper about it.

For example, take my discipline, aerospace engineering. On the surface, how to design a plane or a rocket isn’t subjective. Everyone has the same goal, get people and things from place to place without killing them (yea I bastardized my discipline a bit but that’s basically all it boils down to). Let’s think a little deeper about the implications though. Let’s say you work for a spacecraft manufacturer and let’s hypothetically call it SpaceX. Your rocket is so powerful that during takeoff it destroys the launch pad. That’s an expensive problem so you’re put on the team of engineers dedicated to solving this problem. The team decides that the most effective and least expensive solution is to spray water onto the rocket and launchpad during takeoff. This solution works great! The launchpad stays intact throughout the launch and the company saves money. However, that water doesn’t disappear after launch, and now it’s contaminated with chemicals used in and on the rocket. Now contaminated water flows into the local environment affecting not just the wildlife but also the water supply of the local community. Who is responsible for solving that issue? Do we now need a team of environmental or chemical engineers to solve this new problem caused by the aerospace engineers?

Yes, engineers solve problems, but they also cause problems.

Every action has its reaction. Each solution has its repercussions.

As engineers we possess some of the most dangerous information in the world and are armed with the weapon to utilize it, our minds. Aerospace engineers know how to make missiles, chemical engineers know how to make bombs, computer scientists know how to control entire technological ecosystems. It’s very easy for an engineer to hurt people, and many do. I’m not exempt from this. I used to work for a military contractor, and I still feel pretty guilty about the implications of the problems that I solved. It is an engineer’s responsibility to act and use their knowledge ethically.

Ethical pleas aside, let’s get back to the topic at hand.

Engineering is inherently political. The goal of modern engineering is to avert catastrophe, tackle societal problems, and increase prosperity. If you disagree don’t argue with me, argue with the National Academy of Engineering. It is an engineer’s responsibility to use their knowledge to uplift the world and solve societal problems, that sounds pretty political to me!

An engineer doesn’t solve a problem in a vacuum. Each problem exists within the context of the situation that caused it as well as the society surrounding that situation. An engineer must consider the societal implications of their solutions and designs and aim to uplift that society through their design and solution to the problem. You can’t engineer within a social society without considering the social implications of both the problem and the solution. Additionally, the social implications of those engineering decisions affect different people in different ways. It’s imperative to be aware and mindful of the social inequality between demographics of people affected by both the solution and the problem. For example, our SpaceX company could be polluting the water supply of a poor community that doesn’t have the resources to solve the problem nor the power or influence to confront our multi-billion-dollar company. Now, a multi-billion-dollar company is advancing society and making billions of dollars at the cost of thousands of lives that already struggle due to their social standing in the world. Now the issue has layers that add further social implications that those without money are consistently prone to the whims of those with money. Which, unfortunately, is a step of ethical thought that many engineers don’t tend to take.

Engineers control our world. Engineers decide which problems to solve and how best to solve them. Engineers control who is impacted by those solutions. Engineers have the power to either protect and lift up the marginalized or continue to marginalize them. Those who control the engineers control the world. This is political. This is a social issue.

Now look me in the eyes and tell me that engineering isn’t inherently political.

[professor-in-progress]

My first week

It's Friday, and the end of my very first week of grad school. I was honestly pretty nervous/excited before starting. Going to grad school has been such a far off goal of mine that seemed so far away and unattainable that I can't really believe that I'm doing it.

I've always loved school. My parents love to tell the story of my very first day of school. I'm the oldest child so my Mom was really nervous about sending my off to school. My parents thought that they would have to deal with me crying and begging not to stay. Instead, what I actually did was run to my desk and tell my parents that they could go. I was so excited to start school that while the other kids were begging their parents not to go, I was begging them to go. It was so obvious to my parents that loved school and learning that my dad even told me at 13 that he thought I was going to be a professor. I had not once considered being a professor before that.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I was fully convinced that I wanted to be an aerospace engineer and make stuff. So, I went to college and studied aerospace engineering. And I did it. I got the degree. But about half-way through those five years, I realized that I hated working as an engineer but I loved working as a TA. So, I started thinking about grad school.

I thought that I had to go work a job I hated out in industry until I was old enough and experienced enough to start my PhD. So I didn't start seriously looking into PhD applications until three weeks before they were due. This also just happened to be the week before finals week.

For some context, my dad has an MBA so he knows things about grad school. But, I'm that first person in my family to attempt a PhD. Basically I was so blind to the process. I had no idea how much went into an application and I didn't know anything about research so I had to come up with research interests and methodology preferences alone. I feel like if I knew someone who was in academia, especially one of my parents, they would've told me things about academia so I would have a general knowledge of it. But I didn't know shit!

This kept manifesting especially as I toured PhD programs. I was the youngest and had the least amount of degrees (0 at that time, I still hadn't graduated). It was so scary to walk into a room where you don't know the culture, you don't know the people AND you're the youngest person in the room. Intimating stuff.

All of this to say, walking in on Monday all of this came to a head. I didn't know the culture or the standards or the lingo AND I'm the youngest person in the room by at least 10 years. I was pretty nervous. I still feel like I'm just three toddlers in a trench coat trying to convince everyone that I'm supposed to be here.

Despite that, I love it. This is the most engaged I've ever been in a class. I'm enamored with the amount of thinking and engagement I'm having. I'm not just listening to a lecturer tell me about the stages of a turbofan. I'm having really thoughtful engagement with the things I'm reading about. I love it so much more than undergrad.

It feels really good to be accepted into a community that I never thought I would enter. I really enjoy being around so many smart and passionate people who have the same academic values as me. I don't know; maybe that sounds weird. I just mean that my friends don't enjoy school as much as I do. They're all starting their very well paying engineering jobs and I'm so proud of and honestly a bit jealous of them. They're starting their lives as adults and I'm hiding in grad school.

Regardless, I'm very happy to be where I am right now. I'm enjoying grad school a lot right and it feels good to be working towards a new major goal.

[professor-in-progress]

Hello World!

Honestly, I have no idea if anyone will ever find this blog on this hellscape dead website. Basically this is going to be my public diary as I work on my PhD. I have so many feelings about academia and need to get that energy out somewhere so this is my victim; a silly little tumblr blog. If anyone stumbles upon this blog, here's the scoop on me. I just, back in April 2024, graduated from college with my bachelor's in Aerospace Engineering. I have just recently (August 2024) started grad school to get my PhD in Engineering Education. So I'm going directly from undergrad to a PhD program. That's basically my story, at least what will be relevant to this blog I guess. I hope I don't give this up, I think it'll be really interesting to chronicle my time in grad school!