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Making A 21^st Century Engineer       [Photo Album]

– Missy Globerman

"One of the challenges for us is to marry the best of in-depth technical education with a broadening experience for our students so that they truly gain an understanding of engineering practice," said Thomas L. Magnanti, Dean of Engineering. "UPOP is a key component in achieving this objective."

In its pilot year, the UPOP has launched a five-day, 40-hour intensive seminar for engineering sophomores during the January Independent Activities Period, the first of three phases. The program will promote a greater awareness of the context in which students will put their top-notch math and science courses to use. Students will participate in 10- to 12-week internships in the summer in the second phase of the program. During the third phase in the fall, the students will review their required reflective journals written in the summer, write a final paper, and give an oral presentation on their UPOP experiences.

Off to a running start with almost 80 participants, the program delivered a message to the UPOP students on its very first day—this is the real world; no tardiness will be tolerated; participation is mandatory; and teamwork is even more strongly encouraged than in other MIT courses. Bringing together an exceptional teaching team from both the Sloan School of Management and from several School of Engineering departments, this hands-on, case study-based class centers on ten student teams. Industry professionals serve as teaching assistants, leading the teams and helping to facilitate the course. As practicing engineers who together have decades of combined experience in their fields and include a few MIT graduates, the ten professionals interact with the UPOP students to provide them with unique insights into the realities of engineering careers.

"UPOP is making a strong statement about what engineering education should be," stated Dick K.P. Yue, Associate Dean of Engineering and Professor of Hydrodynamics and Ocean Engineering.

Data collected from employers of MIT graduates, MIT alumni, and students provided the initial push to get the course off the ground, Yue explains. Concerning such matters as the emphasis MIT places on workforce skills, opportunities for internships, and experiences providing interaction with practitioners, "It was unequivocally clear that we needed to do more in terms of preparing our graduates for the work place."

The topics taught in the one-week UPOP course aim to do just that. The UPOP seminar covers such issues as acquiring effective skills in oral presentation delivery to a group, understanding the system dynamics of an organization, how to make products that make money, deriving customer requirements for a product, honing leadership skills, and developing arguments to make a recommendation on a project based on limited given data.

UPOP Director Christopher Resto sees the need for UPOP from both the student’s and the employer’s viewpoints, having worked at Cap Gemini Ernst and Young as a manager of recent MIT graduates and being an MIT alumnus to boot. "I wish I had had something like this program when I was a student," he said. "In my former management capacity, I also saw a clear need for programs like this to make our students more multidimensional and holistic in their approaches to their work."

UPOP internships differ significantly from traditional engineering apprenticeships. In years past, a student had to commit to a longstanding relationship with a chosen industry or government position, and the organization had to pay a fee to recruit MIT interns. Now being phased out, the Engineering Internship Program, which has provided internship opportunities in some School of Engineering departments, never drew a large percentage of students, something that the UPOP now hopes to accomplish.

"With UPOP, we are exercising strong quality controls on these job opportunities. We are ensuring that our educational objectives are being emphasized in each student internship," Resto states.

Among the companies that have already signed on with offers to provide UPOP students internship experiences are Westinghouse, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and Schlumberger. More companies and government organizations are contacting the UPOP office every day as word gets out about the program.

Financial support and enthusiasm for UPOP are also clear. The recent $20 million gift from Sycamore Networks and Cascade Communications co-founder Gururaj ("Desh") Deshpande and his wife Jaishree that launched the new Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT provides an integral $500,000 per year to fund UPOP for an initial five years, totaling $2.5 million. The Lord Foundation has granted UPOP $150,000, and the Kauffman Foundation has granted UPOP $80,000 to pay salaries of UPOP students who choose placements with younger companies that could not otherwise financially sponsor summer positions.

"Industry is hopeful and looks forward to MIT playing an even more significant role in their welfare, and we are working with them to make our graduates more useful," Yue added.

Professors Magnanti and Yue both express high hopes that, as more and more sophomores enroll, UPOP will become as institutionally pervasive as the highly successful Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). The potentially far-reaching benefits of UPOP lie in the highly talented faculty and teaching assistants offering the course. Professor Charles E. Leiserson, head of the Supercomputing Technologies Group in the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, says he is thrilled to "participate in a first-time effort with people across the School of Engineering in a cross-disciplinary team to have an impact on engineering culture. At the end of the day, I want the students to take away the visceral awareness of non-engineering issues that affect engineering."

UPOP faculty member Christopher Magee, Executive Director of the Ford/MIT Strategic Technical Partnership and a Professor of the Practice in the Engineering Systems Division sees the week-long UPOP course as giving students an extremely valuable framework before their practice opportunities. "It will enable them to make a much more accelerated, effective use of their internships so that they will become truly great practicing engineers," he said. "It is possible to learn some of these skills throughout one's career while on the job, but people who go through a process like UPOP to get this ‘engineering science tool kit’ of methods, tools, and ways of thinking will likely be superior performers in their early careers," he said.

Students who signed up for the pilot program are already impressed by what UPOP has to offer, even long in advance of securing their internship positions for the summer. Jose Ramirez, a mechanical engineering major who transferred from the Air Force Academy to MIT, was sold on UPOP from the start. "MIT gives me so many opportunities to grow as an engineer and also as a person. I’ve always been seeking opportunities like UPOP because engineers are not normally the people who get to understand the interaction and logic behind decision-making. This course is showing me that just dealing with people and evaluating the world around you are as much a part of engineering as physics is," he said.

Another UPOP sophomore, Rosa Obregon, has never had an internship. She said she’s excited and wants the experience, the responsibility, and the potential to travel to her UPOP job site. "This course is really opening up the way I view the corporate world. Yes, you’re an intern, but you do have to make decisions, work with people, and think on your feet," she said. "And though we might not see the application of all of the course work at the moment, I know we eventually will once we’re in the real world."