I just listened to this fascinating NPR Story that tells how different cultures, broadly speaking, conceptualize the act of struggling differently.  These different conceptualizations can have profound impacts on how we behave when faced with challenges, which can in turn affect our ability to learn.

Psychologist Jim Stigler, when he was a graduate student, was sitting in on a 4th grade math class in Japan when he saw something that profoundly affected the course of his research.  He discovered that there are big differences between how the East and West conceptualize the struggle to learn.

This is just a generalization, since one can always find counterexamples in any given culture, but the gist of the difference is that Westerners believe that success in school is due to innate intelligence, or talent, whereas Easterners believe success is tied to how willing one is to work and struggle to achieve.

In other words, Westerners are more likely to adopt a fixed mindset, whereas Easterners are more likely to adopt a growth mindset and espouse the virtues of grit and deliberate practice, topics I’ve written about before.

This is truly a fascinating story – please listen to it and let me know what you think by commenting on this post.

 

I decided to use this April Fool’s day to debunk two misconceptions about BME that seem to persist year after year.

 

Myth 1:  BMEs don’t get jobs

This myth is refuted by Georgia Tech’s exit survey, which graduating seniors take every year.  The survey provides two important pieces of information: 1) offer rates and 2) placement rates.  The offer rate is the percentage of graduates who have at least one job offer when they graduate.  The placement rate is the percentage of graduates who have accepted a job offer.

Here are the data for GT engineers according to the Spring 2015 exit survey:

School	Offer Rate	Placement Rate
BMEs	79%	61%
Other engineering majors	83%	68%

The offer rate for BMEs is 79%, which is higher than 3 schools of engineering and lower than 5. So, BMEs are pretty much in the middle of the pack of this very elite group of engineering schools.

But hold on, you say, BME’s placement rate looks awfully low compared to other engineering majors.   Sure, it looks that way.  But remember, a lot more BMEs than other majors attend graduate or professional school (i.e., medical school) after they graduate.  A fairer comparison would be to redefine the placement rate to include the percentage of students who have a job offer in industry OR who are attending graduate/professional school immediately after graduation.

Last spring, 28% of our graduates reported having been accepted to graduate/professional school, with the intent to attend in the fall.  In stark contrast, only 15% of graduates from other engineering majors plan to attend graduate/professional school immediately after graduation.

So, a revised table, with a redefined placement rate (indicated by an asterisk) looks like this:

School	Offer Rate	Placement Rate*
BMEs	79%	89%
Non-BMEs	83%	83%

Finally, it’s worth noting that 87% of our graduating seniors say that if they could choose a college all over again, they would still choose Georgia Tech, and 86% of our alumni who have been in the work force for 3-5 years report they are satisfied with their career choice.

 

By the way, check out stories of our alumni here, at BME Stories

 

Myth 2:  BMEs don’t get “real” engineering skills
Once again, good old-fashioned data refutes this persistent myth. Who better to ask about whether or not BME provides useful skills than our alumni who have been in the workforce for a while? Every three years we do just that. The last time we surveyed our alumni was in March 2014. We sent that survey to 396 alumni who had graduated between 2008 and 2010.  So, they had been in the work force for 4-6 years when we surveyed them.  What did we learn?

93% of our alumni said that BME prepared them well for meeting our 3 main program objectives, which are to produce graduates who are expected to demonstrate the following during their first few years after graduation:

1. mathematics, science, and engineering fundamentals expertise at the interface of engineering and the life sciences which enables them to take leadership roles in the field of biomedical engineering,

2. an ability to use their multidisciplinary background to foster communication across professional and disciplinary boundaries with the highest professional and ethical standards,

3. an ability to recognize the limits of their knowledge and initiate self-directed learning opportunities to be able to continue to identify and create professional opportunities for themselves in the field of biomedical engineering.

 

Now, let’s drill down a little bit deeper:

What percentage of our alumni said BME prepared them well in their professional skills and skills as problem-solvers and designers (Table 1), and in specific technical skills (Table 2)?

Table 1.  Preparation for real-world work:

Skill	% Well-Prepared
Identify, formulate, and solve problems	98
Analyze and interpret data	95
Design a system, component or process to meet desired needs	93
Make prototypes that addresses the needs of a client	88
Function in multidisciplinary teams	98
Interact with colleagues and customers	96

 

Table 2. Preparation in traditional technical skills:

Skill	% Well-Prepared
Statics/mechanics/dynamics	90
Conservation principles	87
Structure and properties of materials	83
Momentum, heat and mass transfer	81
Biomedical sensors and instrumentation	80
Analysis, modeling, control of linear systems	82

Taken together, these data show that a very high percentage of our alumni who have been in the work force for several years feel that BME prepared them well for their professional work.

And this blog post is most definitely NOT an April Fool’s Day joke!!

 

As a BME student, you probably know by now that the department believes it is essential for students to learn how to create, and be an effective member of, high functioning teams.  This is because high functioning teams produce better solutions and more innovative designs than less effective teams or individuals.  But what are the characteristics of great teams and great teammates?

This is a complex and evolving topic, but recent research shows that the best teams are diverse (e.g., NPR and Harvard Business Review).   That is, members of the team have a wide range of backgrounds, perspectives, skills, and ways of thinking.  Equally important, each member of the team listens to and respects the contributions of each person, which enables them to realize the full benefits of their diverse ways of thinking.

Interestingly, Google launched a research initiative called Project Aristotle in 2012 to study hundreds of Google’s teams to figure out why some stumbled while others soared.  The researchers noticed that good teams exhibited two kinds of behaviors.

First, they allowed each member of the team to have equal amounts of time to talk and share their thoughts and ideas.  This is something social scientists call equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.

Quoting from a NY Times piece that describes this study:

On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. If only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.

Second, good teams excelled at reading how others were feeling and reacting to things, based on nonverbal cues.  Researchers would say the team members had high “social sensitivity”.  Again, quoting the NY Times piece, good teams:

seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.

Are you interested in learning more about Project Aristotle?  Read this fantastic piece in the NY Times:  What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

 

 

 

 

 

In my last post I introduced the concept of scholarly grit. A key component of scholarly grit is deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is a concept that was first posited, to my knowledge, by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson while he was at the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of
Colorado at Boulder. He and his co-authors wrote a landmark paper entitled The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. It’s a a fascinating read about the science of deliberate practice.

The key finding of this paper, in the words of its authors, is that

individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years

In other words, what people often ascribe to talent is actually the result of a lot of deliberate practice. You may have heard of the 10,000 hours rule. It is the idea, promoted by the author Malcolm Gladwell, the it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. The myth of the 10,000 hour rule has since been debunked, but the concept of deliberate practice still holds true.

So what is deliberate practice?

Here is my take on deliberate practice and how it relates to students who are majoring in engineering. Engineering is a tough subject and to succeed it really helps to engage in deliberate practice.

First, notice that the phrase deliberate practice has two words.

The use of the first word, deliberate, is…well… quite deliberate!

The gist of being deliberate is to be reflective. When studying for something, or when developing a new skill, don’t just go through the motions of completing a task, such as a homework assignment, just to “get it done” and check it off your list. It’s easy to fall into that mindset; after all, you have hours and hours of work to complete as an engineering student.

But, if you really want to learn something deeply, which you MUST if you want to ensure your success, you must slow down and pay careful attention to the mistakes you make. And it is important that you make mistakes! When you study, you must find that level of challenge that feels hard, where you are uncertain, where you make mistakes. Celebrate your successes, but identify and focus on your weaknesses. Develop a plan to address them, set yourself a deadline to carry out that plan, and then do it.

That is deliberate practice.

But you might wonder – how will I know if I make mistakes? How do I learn from them? A key feature of deliberate practice is feedback. You must get frequent and rapid feedback on your performance. How and where you get this depends on what you are doing; sometimes you can evaluate your own work, sometimes you need to compare what you did against a published solution, sometimes you need to go talk to someone who is more skilled than you are. This could be a classmate, a friend who took the course before you, a teaching assistant, or the professor.

Mere repetition of an activity, without feedback, will not automatically lead to improvement

Here I summarize the basic features of deliberate practice:

• In contrast to play, deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance.
• Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further.
• Deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable.
• Individuals are motivated to practice because practice improves performance

To learn more:

Read Ericsson’s full paper, or his summary, or watch this video by the New Planet School on Deliberate Practice. Also, check out Angela Lee Duckworth’s Ted talk “The key to success? Grit” for an interesting overview of Grit.