Virginia Tech’s Department of Engineering Education celebrates 20 years of impact

In reflecting on 20 years of engineering education, I was thinking about, like, what does it mean historically for Virginia Tech? In 2004, Virginia Tech established one of the first departments in engineering education. It was a bold move that has yielded significant results, far beyond the imagination of its founders. How do we teach people to become engineers? There are so many new technologies that are just kind of rising up. The obvious one is generative AI. How do we use it in a way that is productive and not harmful? We have a very robust engineering ethics group. In many ways, what we're researching is actually setting what the important topics are for the rest of the engineering education field. In the seven years that I've served as head, our research expenditures have grown to about 3 million annually. Our journal publications have nearly tripled? Citations to our work have increased fivefold. Our more than 80 PHD alumni have followed a wide range of career paths, which include industry, government, academia. They are serving as program directors, department chairs, associate deans, with many of them in tenure truck positions. During my time in the Department of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, I have been involved in doctor Walter Lee's NSF career project where we are working to better understand how to support marginalized students through developing more responsive support for them. In my dissertation research, I'm interested in focusing on how specifically women of color navigate engineering and the obstacles, demands and opportunities that are relevant to them. In order to better understand how we can generally support marginalized students and make engineering a more equitable and inclusive place for. Our research creates real impact in a range of spaces, including curriculum, organizational change, ethics and social responsibility, and diversity and cultural inclusivety. Our Department of Engineering Education, it's the first taste of engineering that a lot of our students get exposed to. And we cater to a lot of different backgrounds, people who went to extremely capable schools, people who come from, you know, less served areas. Our mission here is to really expose them to different technologies, point them towards, you know, departments they may not even recognize the names of and sort of expose them to possible career paths. We get this opportunity to let them fail without boundary on things. And that, I think, is a tremendous amount of freedom for the students. I think it's really cool to be in a program where we have scholars, faculty who are doing really, really incredible foundational work in the field. It's really cool to go to a conference and be able to talk to people about the faculty in my program. And they're like, Oh, wow, I know who they are. I read their work. I love their work. You can come back to give Virginia Tech community and feel like you have a steady ground. I am currently a fourth year PhD candidate in Engineering Education. I am an academic and career advisor in the engineering education program. I am the Frith lab manager here. I also run the undergraduate space for Interdisciplinary here in engineering education. I believed in what they were doing. I felt like I would be contributing something. I wanted to be part of a collegial environment where the faculty get along. They collaborate and where students are excited to be there. So I stuck around here as an undergrad employee, and then loved it so much that once I graduated, I started this job ten days after graduation. We have always prioritized research and teaching, community, collaboration, and this has resulted in a department that is more than ready to continue leading this field into the future.