MIT Teaches Social Skills
Business leaders complain that engineers don't have enough practice working with others to finish projects in a timely fashion. So, being the world's top engineering and IT school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology naturally responded to these complaints with a solution: a program tailored for students who want to learn how to operate and apply their skills in the business world.
The plan is for the two-year leadership program to add 30 juniors each year, the Boston Globe reports. So far, students and faculty alike are touting the positive results of the program, which was launched last fall.
"A lot of MIT graduates go out into the real world and fall on their faces because they don't know how to work within a company,'' Tanya Goldhaber, an MIT engineering student tells the Globe. "They expect their bosses to be impressed by their creativity, but they don't deliver the product on time.''
The students in the program meet three times a week. They work in labs that test their leadership skills, the report says. One recent project required the students to come up with an innovative idea and put together a presentation to pitch to the MIT Sloan School of Management. Projects like that allow students to see the other side of product development, something that's important in a business world where contracting, cutting budgets, and efficiency are prized.
"I literally thought two years ago that I'd be an engineer sitting in a cubicle cranking out equations for the rest of my life,'' Goldhaber tells the Globe. "Now I've discovered that I'm good at people as well as machines, and I never would have had the gumption to explore that without this program.''
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Reader Comments
Engineering and research
My late father-in-law, Thomas Gordy, who was a PhD statistician and electrical engineer, worked his entire life for General Electric beginning in transformers. He developed many patents, etc, for the company and came to have his own lab to do whatever it was that he want to do. In a word, he was considered very successful in industry and engineering. He and I would often enough talk about his success and what led to it. He told me that the major advantage that he had was that he graduated from the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) in the last engineering class offered there. In a word he was well versed in both the sciences and the humanities, and he applied all of this to his study and work in engineering. Was he a specialist? Yes, indeed. But, he was a specialist who worked out of the broad background spectrum of the liberal, and liberating, arts. That engineers need "people skills" is a strong symptom of what has gone wrong with the teaching and practice of engineering, I can hear Tom proclaim. There is a deep failure here that is perpetuated by the schools themselves.
Finally a program NOT about being an Entrepreneur
After having employed - and worked with- many MIT graduates, it's nice to see that there's a program which is teaching real leadership (the kind that starts when students are first employed by a company and is manifested by having the students learn to deliver a product on time!) and not how focused on how to *run* a company when they first graduate.
Discover More About the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program
Thanks for featuring this excerpt from the Boston Globe's article on the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program. To discover more about the program's goals, curriculum, and benefits to the engineering profession and engineering industry in the U.S., please visit our website, http://web.mit.edu/gordonelp.
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