Using alumni networking to teach technical communication - Ron Choi ENG 574

Sharp, Julie E. "Using alumni networking to teach technical communication." American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition. Salt Lake City: American Society for Engineering Education, 2004. 1-8.

In this conference paper, Sharp, a teacher of technical communication courses for engineering students at Vanderbilt University, reports on a pilot mentoring project with a technical communication course.  Working in small groups, each student was required to survey two engineering alumnae regarding the types of communication they used in the workplace, the percentage of time spent in communication, and their perceived importance of communication skills in their work.  The students were also given the opportunity to review and analyze real workplace documents.  Students reported their results individually, and as a group, with an opportunity to re-write the report based on instructor feedback.  The students’ results were generally as expected – technical communication is a significant part of technical and managerial engineering positions, and can affect job success.  These results surprised many of the students.  At the end of the mentoring project, students were asked to rate the project, and the results showed that they found the project to be helpful in learning about technical communication and its significance.

I really liked the concept of this project, because it not only helped teach engineering students how to communicate by looking at real-world examples and writing their own reports, but also to illustrate the importance and prevalence of technical communication within the engineering workplace.  There was also an added side benefit of networking and mentoring, as some students maintained contact with their alumni participants.  If this had been done as a research study instead of as a pilot project, I would have preferred to see a more in depth assessment of the improvement in the technical communication skills of the students, compared to those who had not taken the course with the mentoring project.  The student feedback tells us that they liked the project, and that they thought it was useful and enlightening, but that does not actually mean that they became better communicators for it, or focused any more of their energy into improving their communication skills.