How do we make COES more flat?

Post your ideas and thoughts on changes the College should make.

Feedback from COES Convocation

Post your feedback/comments on the COES convocation on The World is Flat.

Is the world flat or not? How about Ruston, LA or Louisiana Tech? Is the College of Engineering and Science preparing students to enter this type of work environment? Students-what are you doing to prepare yourself?

The World Is Flat

The Flattest Place in the World?

I have been ruminating on the question: what is the flattest place in the world? Where is the flattest place I have ever been ?

The big physics labs I visit are very flat. I say that because 1) they have a highly international workforce, 2) the experiments distribute work among collaborators around the world, even though the data collection is centered at the lab, 3) many of the tools that are cited as flattening the world (email, WWW, GNU software, ...) were either developed intially for these experiments, or first used in data-intensive fashions.

In terms of cities, probably Geneva is one of the flattest. Lots of international organizations, but that alone does not mean they are flat. The "flatness" comes about, I belive, because of all these organization depend on a world-wide network of offices and support groups (medical labs and field clinincs for WHO, individual national patent offices for the WTO, etc.) the Bay Area - San Francisco and silicon Valley - are obviously fairly flat.

Although I passed up the chance to visit Bangalore this spring, I wonder if it is really flat? It seems more like a port in an internet-based mercantile economy. As these India-based firms grow and begin outsourcing some their work to other places (Malaysia? Vietnam? Louisiana?) then Bangalore may become flatter.

What changes (if any) should we make in our curricula?

There have been a number of ideas tossed out about international exchange programs, including international students in senior design teams, addressing globalization in various lecture courses, etc. While I think these have merits, my personal opinion is the most important skill we need to provide to our students is to become very adaptable to change. Friedman discusses several ways to be successful in the "flat world" by being special, specialized, anchored, or reall adaptable. I don't feel that we can do very much about the first three of these except make sure we offer relevant degree programs for the future but I do think we have the capability to develop in our students the understanding that they must be innovative and constantly seeking new skills/abilities to make them more competitive. In my experiences, I think this is the one area that has kept the U.S. at the forefront of technology development. We often develop the ideas but aren't always successful in capitalizing on them. In many ways, I think we are already addressing innovation in many of parts of our curricula by trying to include project-based learning experiences that foster innovative thinking and elective courses that teach methods of innovative product design. I think we probably need to look at changes that further integrate this type of content into the core curricula of all our programs. Almost all of the programs have life-long learning mentioned somewhere in their program objectives. I think it would be valuable to develop ideas on how we really pass this on to all of our students.