Guest Editor Letter

September 2023

ECE is #1: Branding and Student Preparedness Initiatives Will Keep Us There and Take Us Further

By: Badri Roysam, University of Houston

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to the new semester! We hope that the transients have settled by now, and the departmental machinery is humming away.

A September 7^th article on CNBC (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/07/college-degrees-with-highest-median-salaries.html ) was stunning in its clarity – they listed the ten college degrees that offered the highest salaries, according to a recent Bankrate analysis of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data. This survey listed Electrical Engineering at #1, and Computer Engineering at #2. For our EECS department heads, Computer Science ranked at #5. This is a message that we can share with prospective and current students to good effect.

As we know, salary is not everything, and I am yet to see a nicer expoisition of our discipline’s many other facets as in our Featured Article on Branding. This emerged from the ECE Communicators’ discussions at the ECEDHA conference earlier this year. Kathleen Meehan, Sid Deliwala, Tony Maciejewski (now at NSF), Jane Halpern, and Priscilla Capistrano have done a marvelous job of arming ECE chairs with a Crash Course on Branding, replete with words and images that we can all use to promote ECE.

The most salient aspect of our discipline is technical rigor, and this has been a long-standing barrier to entry for many students. This issue goes beyond the completion of pre-requisite course requirements. Indeed, we discussed the Looming Crisis of Student Under-preparedness a year ago. It is time to discuss it again since the remedies have not changed.

The Looming Crisis

Despite our valiant efforts and the resilience of our students, it is fair to expect the Fall cohort of ECE students to be less prepared for the rigors of our courses. They have been through a lot of hardship, especially the pandemic and its aftermath, some more than others. While our faculty worked hard to make online and hybrid courses as engaging as possible, many students simply did not engage at the best possible levels. The reasons were numerous, ranging from the inherent difficulty of maintaining attention in online courses to distractions from gadgets, family members, and pets. Despite our best efforts, online student testing has remained inferior to in-person testing. While our best students coped surprisingly well, our weakest students struggled the most. Overall, it is reasonable to assess that student learning was definitely compromised, albeit to varying extents.

This is not a temporary phenomenon that we can ignore, or wish away. The entire educational pipeline from K-12 to the post-baccalaureate has been impacted by the pandemic, and the ripple effects will continue to be felt for many years into the future.

This is also a global phenomenon since almost every country has been impacted by the pandemic, albeit in different ways. What this means is that it is fair to expect international students to be less prepared for graduate courses compared to previous generations of students.

Some Immediate Actions that Can Help

It is not too late to tackle the student under-preparedness problem. As Chairs, we can definitely make a difference, and below are some suggestions.

Creating Faculty Awareness: Making our faculty aware of the impending problem is an important first step. While the most experienced faculty members have already identified the problem and developed all of the needed solutions, it is reasonable to expect the less-experienced junior faculty need help. Chairs can perform a valuable service by communicating with the faculty on this topic. Once the faculty are made aware of the problem, they will be able to craft solutions that are appropriate for the respective courses that they are scheduled to teach in the Fall semester. For the most part, the faculty will find the need to devote extra efforts to fill gaps in student preparedness. While some departments and faculty can choose to conduct full-blown “boot camps”, we focus on less expensive strategies below.
Encouraging Faculty Communication with Students During the Summer: June/July is the perfect time for faculty members to reach out to students who are enrolled in their Fall classes. Here is a list of some ideas:
1. Welcome to ECExxxx: Simply welcoming students to the course by way of an email or a meeting via Zoom will have the effect of starting a helpful conversation. This message can, for example, affirm the instructor’s commitment to student success, describe what operational skills are knowledge are needed to succeed in the course, and how to make sure they are sufficiently prepared. If a course is particularly challenging and needs advance preparation, it is helpful to say so, in plain language. The goal is to alert students to the need to start paying attention well in advance of the Fall class opening. As a concrete example, I tell my ECE 3337 Signals and Systems students that this is a challenging course that requires fluency with Complex Variables, Calculus, especially Differential Equations, Integration by Parts, and Circuits. I provide them with pointers to many study resources and provide guidelines on how to test their fluency on these topics.
1. Procure Textbooks Early, and Get to Chapter 2: Far too many students buy or download their textbooks just before or after classes have started. This is often too late. Many students fall behind and need to devote numerous hours of study to catch up with the course. Simply asking students to obtain their textbooks in the Summer (the cost is the same) and spending some time getting to know the topics in advance sets them up for a much better Fall semester experience. Perhaps the best advice is to ask students to study chapters 1 and 2 during the summer. This is not as time-consuming as many students may fear – a couple of hours a day of advance study pays off handsomely.
1. Describe Effective Study habits: Given that the vast majority of engineering topics can only be learned effectively by doing, e.g., solving problems with paper and pencil, and conducting experiments, rather than mere reading, encouraging students to actually work through the problems in Chapters and 1 and 2, is likely to set the stage for a successful start of the Fall semester.
1. Avoiding Illusions: It is distressingly common for students to read a section of the textbook and (falsely) feel like they adequately understand the topic. We have all seen this dangerous illusion in action, especially after an Exam. Simply alerting students to the fact that they need to actually attempt, and successfully solve problems to verify their understanding goes a long way towards helping students come better prepared.
1. Describe Classroom Skills: Asking students to study in advance for each lecture is perhaps the most important step. A student who is at least partially conversant with a topic will better understand the instructor’s comments, ask better questions, and importantly, better understand the instructor’s answers. Implementing this simple but powerful idea merely requires that instructors provide students with a sufficiently accurate schedule of lectures for the entire semester.

Do you have an initiative in your department worth sharing? We would love to feature your efforts in the next ECEDHA Source newsletter. Increasingly, our articles are in the form of the ECE Conversations video podcast. It is friendly, authentic, personal, and natural.

Here are some of the topics of current interest for future ECE Conversations:

The impacts of AI on ECE education and research;
Strategies and Experiences in meeting the semiconductor re-shoring challenge;
The growing footprint of healthcare-related research in ECE departments;
Growing the workforce for the future electronics-intensive defense industry;
The new ECE Chair experience, the ups, and the downs;
Teaching engineering values; and
Strategies and best practices for developing future ECE faculty.

As always, we welcome short articles from ECE department heads & faculty on topics of broad interest to our community.

Wishing you a happy new Fall Semester,

Badri Roysam, D.Sc., Fellow IEEE, Fellow AIMBE
Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor
Chair, Electrical & Computer Engineering Department
University of Houston
Houston, Texas 77204-4005
Phone: 713-743-1773
Email: broysam@uh.edu