X

Guest Editor Letter - April 2023

ECE Resources ECEDHA Source eNewsletter April 2023 Guest Editor Letter - April 2023

April 2023

 

Guest Editor Letter

Core Engineering Values - the Big Next Thing for ECE Departments?

By: Badri Roysam, University of Houston

Dear Colleagues,

It was great to see you at the Annual Conference – I found it to be an especially friendly, engaging, productive, and memorable experience. I hope your experience was similarly positive. In parallel to the stellar lineup of speakers and panelists, mother nature put on quite a show for us with sudden desert snowfalls melting into sunny days. The New Mexico food was delicious. To cap it all, we were treated to an amazing live rodeo performance.

In this issue of the ECEDHA Source, we take on Engineering Values, a topic that has been bubbling under our feet for some time, especially during the pandemic, the post-pandemic chaos, and recently, the attack of AI chatbots. I hope you agree that there is a compelling and urgent need for us to re-examine ECE education from the standpoint of instilling honor, ethics, service, and the many other great engineering values that make our profession rise above the rest. In this regard, we are delighted to feature an article by our colleague Mark McKinney on The Honor Code and the Engineering Code of Ethics as taught at The Citadel – the military college of South Carolina. Granted that the typical ECE department is not so tightly connected with military culture, but I found it to be thought-provoking.

Inspired by Mark’s article, and our earlier ECE Conversation with Doug Melton, I came up with the following wish list of Core Engineering Values that would benefit our students tremendously.

  1. EXCELLENCE
  • Knowledge of fundamentals
  • Attention to Detail
  • Attention to Safety and learning from failure analysis
  • Attention to Security
  • Effective Communication
  • Entrepreneurial Mindset
  • Lifelong learning
  1. HUMAN VALUES
  • Sense of honor and responsibility
  • Ethics and Integrity
  • Servant leadership
  • Lack of bias
  • Transparency
  • Healthy competition
  • Diversity, Inclusion, and Respect for others
  • Trust and Stewardship
  1. SERVING HUMANITY
  • Focus on solving problems in service of humanity
  • Knowledge sharing and mentoring
  • Teamwork and collaborative spirit

Does your department have active initiatives in teaching engineering values? Would you be interested in sharing your experience with your fellow ECE Chairs? Please contact us. We would love to feature your ideas and efforts in the next ECE Conversation podcast.

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

  1. The impacts of AI on ECE education and research;
  2. Strategies and Experiences in meeting the semiconductor re-shoring challenge;
  3. The growing footprint of healthcare-related research in ECE departments;
  4. Growing the workforce for the future electronics-intensive defense industry;
  5. The new ECE Chair experience, the ups, and the downs;
  6. Teaching engineering values; and
  7. 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 end of semester season,

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