I have great colleagues to collaborate with when incorporating learning techniques. It’s important to know that you don’t have to do this entirely by yourself, that we are a village. Initially, my partnership with the Student Success Center involved having students in my upper-level courses and labs attend a “Jump Start” workshop at the beginning of the semester, then select from another workshop of their choice. After ongoing conversations with Betty Curry, we saw an opportunity to provide more of an impact by infusing student success strategies directly into the freshman engineering design course. Based on further discussions with Betty, Katherine Troyer, Petra Bowman, Luke Tunstall, and Laura Kalb, we concluded the following topics were appropriate for first/second-year students: time management, reading/note-taking skills, problem-solving, and discovery/growth mindset. Finally, we worked on how to team teach various topics in the course. I can honestly say that this experience was amazing, and hopefully helped students.
I really enjoyed acquiring new equipment to support the fluid mechanics (and heat transfer) lab courses when we first moved into CSI, which was a big improvement in both the equipment and facilities. I remember these huge crates of equipment being stored, and felt like Christmas so much so that I couldn’t wait, and unbox everything myself during the winter break. The new fluid mechanics experiments such as pipe flow, pump, and wind tunnel provide hands-on experience for students and allowed me to transform this lab course to tie better with the lecture-based course. My excitement of fluid mechanics and other courses can be seen in how I organize the course to engage students intentionally, from my delivery of pre-lab lectures to helping a student with a question, and my genuine excitement for that “light bulb” moment when a student figures it out.
I enjoy being at Trinity because I can hang out not only with fellow STEM colleagues, but with social scientists, and humanists as well, and that’s unique to most other schools. As an early-career faculty, I attended “Beer Tuesday” regularly, so I obtained a wide perspective of what colleagues from across the university do. I learned that no one department has a monopoly on caring for their students or excellence in teaching, and that we have different approaches, some of which have helped me develop into a better faculty. Many of these colleagues have truly supported me in various initiatives, so I have a deep respect for both faculty and staff across the university.
With the MakerSpace, we wanted to change the culture from a transactional approach, where students give their hand or Computer-Aided Design (CAD) drawings to a technician to fabricate their parts or outsource to a company to manufacture, to a transformative/holistic approach, providing the education experience of students to see a design from concept to final product. Our hope is to “democratize” academic making by incorporating it in the Humanities and Social Science along in STEM. I see great potential for academic making because it relates to our Trinity Tomorrow strategic plan: support expanding and strengthening experiential learning opportunities for all students; integrating professional programs with the liberal arts and sciences; ability to pursue partnerships with other institutions (including universities, businesses, nonprofit organizations, and cultural institutions). There are amazing things being developed, which I can’t wait to see come to fruition.