Dear MBE students:
I’m very excited to announce that we have established the Student Advisory Board for the Mechanical & Biomedical Engineering department for the 2020-2021 academic year. You can learn more about the role and mission of our SAB here. Check back soon for profiles of the current members.
Please view the SAB as a resource for all of our students to help guide the faculty and staff as we deliver, improve, and refine our academic programs. Your voice is important to us.
Well, the semester is almost here — and before long we’ll be back at our classes, worried about homework, trying to fit in our work schedule and all that.
As I’ve mentioned in previous updates, I know this is a particularly stressful time and we all wish we could have a more traditional experience, but that’s simply not meant to be this semester.
Please know that the faculty and staff of the department are doing our very best to serve you and bring you the best quality educational experience possible under these circumstances.
But all of our efforts won’t matter unless you’re willing to come to this situation with a positive attitude and an open mind about these rather non-traditional classroom methods.
As we get ready to resume operations, I want to remind you that we are living through a once-in-a-generation event. Everything that happens after this will be compared to this year. Every experience we have will be colored by our current experiences. This pandemic will not necessarily define you, you have the opportunity to define yourself by how you respond to it. Here’s what I mean. Think about your future self, sitting in an interview for your first engineering position. The hiring manager rightly thinks that she would learn more about your character by learning about how you responded to the events of 2020. By now, she’s talked to dozens of newly-minted engineers and she’s found that they generally fall into two categories. There are those that harbor a lingering anger for how the pandemic affected their lives. They feel cheated and know they’ll never get that time back. The other group shares that sense of disappointment at opportunities lost, but found it in themselves to grow, embrace new ways of learning, picked up some new skills, and genuinely feel they emerged from the pandemic a better person and more prepared for a professional career.
So I want to ask you two questions:
Which group do you think has a better chance at the job?
Which group do you want to be in?
Stay healthy and learn well!
John Gardner
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Maintaining an unshakable focus on learning
John F. Gardner, Ph.D., P.E.
Professor and Chair of Mechanical & Biomedical Engineering
Sustainability Governance Council Co-Chair
Director, CAES Energy Efficiency Research Institute
(208) 426-5702