I’m working on a new way to explain our degree programs. I’ll get to the vulgar bit at the bottom.
Let me tell give you the big picture, then I’ll explain what we’re doing.
When I was in college for Graphic Design, during our junior year, my classmates started to say things like this: “They’re not teaching us how to DO anything — I wouldn’t know how to take a magazine from text to print… why am I even here? I can identify the anatomy of a typeface, I can draw letters by hand, but I don’t know what all of these settings are in Illustrator!”
Interestingly, my friends who were studying engineering were saying the same kinds of things. “All I’ve been doing is theory and calculus. I had to teach myself how to make a blinker circuit…”
I didn’t feel that way because I had been working some really great jobs all through school, and felt really confident in my technical skills. What they were missing was this:
College is not tech school. It’s there to teach us how to think, and how to continue learning our entire lives. If it was tech school, we’d all be obsolete the moment we graduated.
So, that happened, I graduated, and forgot about it. Then I started working for the College of Engineering at the University of Missouri.
I was talking to a undergraduate advisor when he told me essentially the same thing. I quickly discovered that all faculty were aware that some students came to college with the wrong expectations.
And can you blame them?
How much do we push the “hands on learning” in our marketing materials — when really, the only regimented hands on activities are only there to reinforce the theory. They’re not out actually building some-incredible-thing from start to finish. It’s labs whether you’re in art class or chemical engineering.
So I began to develop a different kind of undergraduate content — content that stops talking about how the department is so well established and interdisciplinary. I started working with faculty to write about what a degree actually is; content that honestly emphasizes how much of their education is truly on their own heads if they want to learn practical nuts and bolts skills (i.e. technology, team management, job possibilities)
So far that content looks like this (in its first stage).
Step two is a comparison chart laying out engineering vs. the tech school equivalent.
Step three will be student and alumni videos talking about the same kinds of things.
One of the department chairs that saw this content (and loved it) described the text as “vulgar, but it’s so conversational and says the right things.”
Please let me know what you think.
