A part of 6.1 Lightning Talk session

Lydia Wilkinson, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice (ISTEP)
Alison McGuigan, Professor, Chemical Engineering, FASE

The alumni interview and presentation assignment gives graduate students in our “Research Methods and Project Execution” course an opportunity to connect with an alumnus to learn about their key graduate school experiences and the skills that enabled their success as graduate students and during their transition into a professional career. As such, it is an important vehicle to help our students learn about the valuable skills they are developing through graduate school, to identify the resources available to them within their immediate graduate school community, and to articulate the characteristics of professional life that they value.

In this lightning talk we will introduce our alumni interview and presentation assignment, discuss its significance in the course and transferability to other contexts, and share some of what our students have learnt by completing this assignment. Specifically, we will share the skills that previous graduates describe as key to their future careers, and the activities that contributed to the development of these skills. These insights, drawn from fifteen iterations of the assignment, influence the resources and strategies that we emphasize in this course as we work to create a caring graduate community in engineering.