Apprenticeship

From my experience there are certainly opportunities for Freshmen to interact with upperclassmen and be in an apprenticeship position on campus. The source of these interactions can be as wide ranging as college dormrooms, RSOs, classes, or outside social experiences.

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As a freshman I lived in a certified private dorm, and I was assigned a room with a senior and a suite including another senior. Although there experience in the biology curriculum did not directly apply to chemical engineering, they each had more than two cents to tell me about what I should do in college. The two of them were really a stark contrast of the kind of “wisdom” that passes down from older to younger U of I students. On one hand, my roommate would tell me of easy classes that I can take, encouraged me to spend less time studying, and generally offered advice on how to “work the system” at the university. On the other hand, my suitemate would talk to me about opportunities to get involved on campus to get help or give help, how I can better prepare for a career, and generally offered advice on how to be an active participant in making my college years fruitful.

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The difference in “wisdom” from these two sources was like night and day. Had I followed one set of advice completely, I would have gotten relatively little out college and aimed to just “glide” to graduation to get my degree, while not going out of my way to make friends or have healthy focused relationships. Had I followed the other set of advice completely, I would probably be even better off than I am now, with much accomplished academically and many connections made with people through reaching out as much as possible.

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Herein lies my major concern with social apprenticeship in college- it seems to be very hit-or-miss. And I feel from the size and composition of the student body at U of I that quite a few sadly turn out to be misses. This may be an unalterable ill of American society though, that there are few motivated individuals with pure motives that want to help others to be motivated, too. Unfortunately, this is highly contagious in the college setting, when high school valedictorians can become “gliders” in four short years (my roommate with little motivation is an example of this).

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Academic apprenticeship gained through such avenues as professional clubs and RSOs, although more narrow, can yield a more consistently positive influence, since the tie that bonds members has an underlying tone of fostering personal and professional growth and pursuit of goals. The problem for such a high enrollment university, though, is that many students may “slip through the cracks” and never reach out or be reached out to through these organizations. It seems that this is more of the hole we are trying to help fill as a class project. If through the avenue of high enrollment classes we can reach students typically lost in the shuffle and start them on the path of focused relationships that foster personal and professional growth and pursuit of goals as the professional clubs and RSOs do, it may effectively form a bridge for students.

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Across the chasm that lies between a successful high school career with familiar faces and activities, and the “new” experience of life and study at a large public research university like U of I is where freshmen need refocusing. This can be effectively directed by older students that have experience and a drive to motivate younger students.

Fred's Learning

Whether I have learned from an experience can seem an easy thing to know, but a hard thing to explain (sometimes I just know that I know that I know). I think probably the best evidence for whether I have learned is whether an experience has been transformative. If I gain knowledge but it does not change the way I perceive the world, even a little bit, then I have not actually learned- I have just memorized. This idea is especially relevant now at a time when Google and Wikipedia have made rote facts about as important as knowing Morse code, and thus the transformative action of learning experiences is almost the exclusive goal for an individual. Granted, there are some experiences that cause great transformation; for example, the awareness of poverty that comes with spending time working in a deaf village in Jamaica. Other experiences seem smaller but still shift or enhance our perception; for example, learning how the calculus can be applied to optimize profits in a business application. Whatever learning experience I go through, however, I don’t feel I’ve learned if I don’t come out a slightly different person.

In courses, typically my learning is communicated to the teacher by way of their evaluation methods (e.g. exams, papers, homework) and this is usually a good indicator for me. I can really think of few times when I felt like I knew the material, but could not perform in these tests of my learning. However, it is completely possible that throughout my sixteen-plus years of formal education that these traditional methods of evaluation have infiltrated my personal definition of learning to where the test not only measures my learning, it defines my learning. This would be a disappointing conclusion since it reduces the richness of an experience in my own mind to an algorithm.

The only possible exception to learning despite what the exams show is the rare case when a teacher’s expectations are ill-defined and the study material is unknown to the class. This usually can only happen when there is a very small class size, perhaps making the teacher relax too much- one particular class of mine where this situation occurred had an enrollment of six students. In this case, I remember feeling that I learned every time I left class or did the homework, but the exams seemed to emphasize random subjects that I had not taken the time to master. This lack of communication with regard to expectations between teacher and student could have been helped by the implementation of a more specific syllabus or study guides outlining what he wanted us to know.

The communication of evidence of my learning outside a class depends on if the course is closer to general education or technical education. To communicate my mastery in an area of general education is easier, as many people will have gained enough knowledge of their own to relate to what I have learned, even if it is above and beyond what is common; this could be explaining grammar learned in my English class, which many can remember learning back in high school. To communicate mastery in an area of technical expertise to the average person is difficult because they may be so removed from the background of the material in vocabulary, methods, or history, that no bridge can be built in a short amount of time that allows them to understand if I know my stuff or if I just seem “fluent” in the foreign language that is “magnetohydrodynamic modeling algorithms” or whatever. Context determines whether others can see evidence of learning.

Well-roundedness or Specialized Curriculum

Could required courses be taken out of college majors?

One could see that freeing up the student’s schedule to take electives of his or her choice could help the student become more well-rounded. This notion of well-roundedness is not just an idea that a graduate will have broad learning in multiple unrelated areas not directly linked to the concentration of their studies. It is also important that a student build perspective from taking classes outside their major, so that when performing on a job after college they can see the “big picture” of what they are trying to accomplish. They should be able to see the societal impacts of their actions and how they fit into historical and business contexts, even in highly technical areas. However, there are already general education requirements and an amount of free electives (for most majors) for this exploration and perspective building to take place without taking away from the major requirements.

One argument against more free electives, however, is that many students looking for the “path of least resistance” through college will jump on the opportunity as a way to just become more disengaged from college learning by taking the easiest classes possible and minimally participating in using this opportunity to gain understanding of more diverse perspectives.

As mentioned in my previous blog post, I feel that all of the required courses in my major served to give me knowledge that I was expected to already have entering into my internship with ADM. This is not to say that I did not at times sense the presence of outdated or nearly-irrelevant material in some of my required courses.

One of my professors from the department of chemical & biomolecular engineering once explained that undergraduate ChemE courses are kind of like a hazing. They are forced upon us young ones because the older ones had to go through it, and thus as graduates we can be welcomed into the camaraderie of those who persevered in spite of an often grueling curriculum.

This is just to say that some courses in a major might seem non-utilitarian (“when am I going to ever use this?”), but they facilitate perspective-building within the major so a student can know the historical contexts, foundational development, important innovators, and major societal issues under otherwise technical subjects. Often, these supporting classes come under the heading of “technical electives” which are focused on this supporting knowledge or specific technical branches of study.

So, then a better question than the one first put forth is perhaps, “If employers want college graduates to be well-rounded and experts in their technical area, is the current balance of free electives and required courses giving them what they want?” At this time, it would seem that required courses should not be dropped.