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Session 3561

Promoting Professionalism in Traditional and Nontraditional Ways William Jordan and Melvin Corley College of Engineering and Science Louisiana Tech University Ruston, LA 71272

Abstract

For a several years our Mechanical Engineering program has had a one semester hour senior seminar. The purpose of the class is to promote professionalism and ethical behavior as senior students transition to the professional workplace. This supports one of our program objectives. Recent assessment data suggested that the course had not really been fulfilling its stated purpose. This paper describes changes that have been made to help the course better achieve its objectives.

The first change was to bring in a number of outside speakers who could relate their real world life experiences to those of the students. On a regular basis, we now bring into our class speakers who give presentations on the following topics: ! Experiences the engineer will face early in his career (by a recent graduate). ! Experiences the engineer will face by the time he reaches mid career (by someone who has graduated 10-15 years ago). ! Financial planning by a certified financial planner. ! Intellectual property presentation by the university’s director of intellectual property.

These topics were suggested by our industrial advisory board based on interviews they conduct with our students twice each academic year.

We supplement these presentations with information on a number of other professional topics. We chose to use the small ASME book: The Unwritten Laws of Engineering1. This book has excellent content. The first year we had students make presentations on material taken directly from the book. Most did traditional PowerPoint presentations which were adequate in terms of material content but rather dull for the student listeners. The last two years we had the students continue to present these topics, but stated they could not just make a traditional presentation, they had to do something creative.

“Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering Education”

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Jordan, W., & Corley, M. (2004, June), Promoting Professionalism In Traditional And Nontraditional Ways Paper presented at 2004 Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--12896