Paper ID #25447

Moving Forward with the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program at MIT - Building Community, Developing Projects, and Connect- ing with Industry

Dr. Edward F. Crawley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Ed Crawley is the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for engineering education of the NAE. He is the Founding President of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) and. the Co-Director of NEET at MIT. Dr. Anette Hosoi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Anette (Peko) Hosoi is Associate Dean of Engineering and the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Me- chanical Engineering, at MIT. She received her PhD in Physics from the University of Chicago and went on to become an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in the MIT Department of Mathematics and at the Courant Insti- tute, NYU. She is a leader in the study of the hydrodynamics of thin fluid films and in the nonlinear physi- cal interaction of viscous fluids and deformable interfaces. Her work spans multiple disciplines including physics, biology and applied mathematics, and is being used, in collaboration with Schlumberger-Doll Research, Bluefin Robotics, and Boston Dynamics to guide the engineering design of robotic crawlers and other mechanisms. Prof. Hosoi is an exceptional, innovative teacher and an inspiring mentor for women in engineering. She was awarded the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching, and a MacVicar Fellowship.She is a recipi- ent of the 3M Innovation Award and has held the Doherty Chair in Ocean Utilization at MIT. She is a Radcliffe Institute Fellow and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Her research interests include fluid mechanics, bioinspired design and locomotion, with a focus on optimization ofcrawling gastropods, digging bivalves, swimming microorganisms and soft robotics. Prof. Hosoi is also an avid mountain biker and her passion for sports has led her to create MIT Sports Lab, a program that is designed to build an interconnected community of faculty, students, industry partners, alums and athletes who are dedicated to applying their technical expertise to advance the state-of-the-art in sports. Dr. Gregory L. Long Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology Gregory L. Long, PhD is currently the Lead Laboratory Instructor for NEET’s Autonomous Machines thread at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has a broad range of engineering design, proto- type fabrication, woodworking, and manufacturing experience, and he has taught mechanical engineering design, robotics, control of mechanical systems, and a variety of mathematical topics for over 20 years before joining the faculty at MIT. He has published scholarly articles on robot mechanics and control, and he has a textbook titled ”Fundamentals of Robot Mechanics”. Greg received his bachelors of science degree in chemical engineering from Stanford University, his masters of science and doctorate degrees in mechanical engineering and applied mechanics from the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania, and his masters of liberal arts degree in mathematics for teaching from Harvard University. Address: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 35-316, Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts, 02139 Phone: 617-253-5575 Email: [email protected] Dr. Timothy Kassis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dr. Timothy Kassis completed his postdoctoral training under Profs. Linda Griffith (BE) and David Trumper (MechE) at MIT. Prior to that, Dr. Kassis obtained a Ph.D. in Bioengineering and an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA, and a B.Eng. in Electronic and Communications Engineering from the University of Nottingham, UK. Dr. Kassis has lived for extended amounts of time in the Philippines, Canada, UK, Lebanon, Syria, and since 2008, the United States.

c American Society for Engineering Education, 2019 Paper ID #25447

Dr. Kassis is currently the lead instructor for the School of Engineering’s New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) Living Machines (LM) thread and is also the instructor for 20.051, 20.052 and 20.053 which are the three classes entitled ’Living Machines’ required by all students participating in the LM thread. Dr. Kassis’ research interests lie at the convergence of engineering, biology, and computation. He is particularly interested in creating engineering tools to answer difficult biological questions. Dr. Kassis has worked on a variety of interdisciplinary research projects from elucidating the role of lymphatics in lipid transport to designing organ-on-chip microfluidic models to developing deep convolutional networks for biomedical image processing. Mr. William Dickson, General Motors Will graduated with a B.S. from MIT in Materials Science & Engineering in 2014, and followed that with a M.Eng. from the University of California at Berkeley in the same field. On top of the technical classes, Will gained a passion for leadership, diversity, hard work, and continuous learning in order to make an impact on the world. After roles in Michigan for General Motors as a hardware-in-the-loop simulation engineer and assistant program engineering manager for General Motors’ full-size pickup truck, Will has led GM’s embedded presence in the MIT and Boston ecosystem since late 2017. GM’s open innovation strategy in the Boston area involves proactively sharing technical problems with small communities who can accelerate our solution development - namely students and startups. On top of this, Will evaluates and connects relevant businesses in the area to the many functions of General Motors. Will works with many programs directly at MIT in a mentorship & advisory capacity, including: New Engineering Education Transformation, the Sandbox Innovation Fund, the Leaders of Global Operations Dual-Degree Program, the Gordon Engineering Leadership program, the Office of Minority Education, and individual classes & professors. Dr. Amitava ’Babi’ Mitra, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Amitava ”Babi” Mitra +1-617-324-8131 | [email protected] Dr. Amitava ’Babi’ Mitra is the founding executive director of the New Engineering Education Transfor- mation (NEET) program at MIT. Together with faculty co-leads Ed Crawley, Ford Professor of Engineer- ing at MIT and founding president of Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Russia and Anette ”Peko” Hosoi, associate dean of the MIT School of Engineering and Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Mitra is co-leading what is arguably one of the most impactful initiatives in higher education today, an initiative launched by MIT’s School of Engineering in 2016 to reimagine and transform MIT’s undergraduate engineering education. Mitra has led and grown entrepreneurial educational ventures both in the corporate world as well as in academia. He transformed a small e-learning R&D group into the profitable Knowledge Solutions Business at NIIT, Inc. as its senior vice-president and was the first chief, Distance Learning Programs Unit, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India. He was a founding member, board of governors of one of India’s leading NGOs, the Pan-Himalayan Grassroots Development Foundation, Kumaon. What he enjoys doing most is setting up and running innovative ’start-up’ educational initiatives within established universities (as in his current role at MIT) or as new institutions (as the founding Dean of Engineering, BML Munjal University, India where he launched ’Joy of Engineering’, a first-year hands- on course designed to get students excited about engineering). Mitra earned his undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. (chemical engineering) degrees from BITS, Pilani and undertook his doctoral research at the department of chemical engineering, MIT. He studied at St. Columba’s School, New Delhi and was a National Science Talent Scholar. His wife is an English teacher and former chair, MIT Women’s League Board; they reside in Massachusetts, USA. Their older child (MIT ’14, varsity squash captain) is a Consultant at Altman Vilandrie, Boston. Their younger child (Colby College ’21, Maine, varsity squash) is majoring in computer science and economics. Mitra loves food, music, the intersects across people and technology, growing up with his children and playing squash.

c American Society for Engineering Education, 2019 Moving Forward with the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program at MIT --- Building Community, Developing Projects and Connecting with Industry

Abstract

In Fall 2016, the MIT Dean of Engineering chartered the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) initiative, a new cross-departmental effort to rethink engineering education (what students learn and how students learn) in a fundamental way across the school of engineering. NEET aims to educate young engineers to build the “new machines and systems” that will address societal challenges of the 21st century. NEET alumnus will be prepared to work as entrepreneurs/innovators, makers and discoverers, and future leaders through learning and practicing the NEET Ways of Thinking: cognitive approaches such as creative thinking, critical thinking, systems thinking and humanistic thinking that can help individuals think and learn more effectively and efficiently on their own initiative, throughout their lifetime.

In Fall 2017, NEET launched two pilot cross-departmental “threads” for sophomores in engineering; Autonomous Machines (covering traditional departments of aeronautics and astronautics, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering and computer science) and Living Machines (covering biological engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science and other technical degrees). These threads are cross-departmental pathways of classes and projects in areas that address the “new machines and systems” of the future and that are likely to play a major part in impacting the world when the students graduate. By participating in the pilot, students will earn an SB degree from the department they are majoring in and a NEET Certificate naming the thread, within the usual four-year duration. NEET has launched two additional pilot threads in Fall 2018: Advanced Materials Machines (covering materials science and engineering and mechanical engineering) and Clean Energy Systems (covering nuclear science and engineering, civil and environmental engineering and mechanical engineering).

The NEET approach and curriculum developed over more than nine months of discussion that was informed by evidence gathered from students, faculty and alumni; input from thought leaders; a NEET- commissioned global engineering education benchmarking study, and; inputs from industry. Senior managers from over forty companies were interviewed and surveyed on the NEET Ways of Thinking, in terms of how proficient(scale of 0-5) they would expect a graduating MIT engineer to be on each of those cognitive approaches. Many managers said, for example, that it was no longer a question of training students on “communication skills” or “soft skills”. The ability to sell an idea properly --- marshal technical and other resources within the company and from outside (experts from MIT, other experts, conferences, online, etc.) and cogently present to senior managers and team members --- was a differentiating skill even for entry-level engineers.

Feedback was sought from sophomores in the first cohort both through anonymous online surveys and through face-to-face discussions. They responded that what they liked most about NEET was that they were becoming part of a professional community; this feedback though welcome, was somewhat unexpected as NEET had not been designed with that goal in mind. Sophomores appreciated the project- centric approach and the interactions NEET was starting to develop with industry.

Though it is far too early to come to meaningful conclusions for the medium to longer term, the initial response is encouraging. Over 5% of the Class of 2020 engineering population voluntarily opted for NEET in Fall 2017, and that has grown in Fall 2018 to over 12% of the Class of 2021 engineering students. These are significantly larger numbers than the number of students that have typically tended to opt for many new academic programs in the past and larger than the enrollment in most majors.

This paper will describe how NEET and the students in NEET are going about building community, how projects are being designed and implemented (including how the NEET Ways of Thinking are being incorporated), and how NEET and a specific company, General Motors, are prototyping an integrated collaboration, as a harbinger of more such industry connects in the future. We will share our key learnings and outline what we see as the next steps for the future, both strategic and tactical.

1. The Context Chuck Vest who served as president of MIT and subsequently of the National Academy of Engineering has said that much of what we view as engineering fundamentals was shaped by what is commonly termed “engineering science”1. This approach evolved through World War II and continued after that since scientists were increasingly coming to the forefront as inventors. The pendulum swung a bit too far from practical engineering, and it was now time to find the right balance. According to Vest, “Students must learn how to conceive, design, implement and operate (CDIO) complex engineering systems of appropriate complexity.”1

It is believed that the late management guru Peter Drucker famously said:” Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Fundamentally, any change including changes in curricula and educational approach requires a change in culture that builds on the values of the institution. Kotter2 states that the “methods managers have used in the attempt to transform their companies to stronger competitors --- including cultural change --- routinely fall short…because they fail to alter behavior”. He reiterates “again and again the critical need for leadership to make change happen”. The NEET initiative is cognizant of this and has given deliberate thought on how to root the program in the culture and values of MIT, and work towards a goal that is bold and transformational.

NEET was launched by MIT in Fall 2017 for the class of 2020. The thinking behind the initiative, the goals, strategy, the three artefacts of NEET, progress till mid-Spring 2018 and the initial student feedback and response have been covered in detail in an earlier paper3. This paper covers our experience with two cohorts, the classes of 2020 and 2021, and focuses on the emerging need to develop the NEET community, projects that have been implemented and what we have learned, and our initial experience in connecting with industry.

2. The NEET program

In Fall 2016, the dean of engineering at MIT chartered NEET (New Engineering Education Transformation), a new cross-departmental “project-centric” effort to rethink engineering education (what students learn and how students learn) in a fundamental way across the school of engineering.

The high-level objectives of NEET are to: • Reimagine what and how our students learn, to better prepare them to address critical societal challenges in the 21st century. • Strengthen MIT’s contribution to engineering education worldwide.

NEET is based on the following four principles: • Our education should focus on preparing our students to develop the new machines and systems that they will build in the middle of the 21st century. • We should help our students to prepare themselves to be makers, discoverers or along this spectrum, and we should teach engineering fundamentals as a foundation for careers both in research and in practice. • We should build our education around the way our students best learn, engaging them in their learning, and implementing pilots to understand the desirable balance of classroom, project and digital education for the digital natives. • In view of the speed of scientific and technological development, we should teach students how to think more effectively, and how to learn more effectively by themselves.

The societal challenges our students need to tackle are perhaps best exemplified by the Grand Challenges for Engineering program of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) which is aimed at inspiring young engineers across the globe to address the biggest challenges facing humanity in the 21st Century. As per NAE, “The committee’s report, released in 2008, identified its 15-word vision for engineering in the 21st century as the ‘continuation of life on the planet, making our world more sustainable, secure, healthy, and joyful.’ The report also presented 14 goals that must be satisfied globally to realise (sic) this vision, named the Grand Challenges for Engineering. From the need to develop affordable clean energy solutions and increase access to renewable environmental resources, to facing new challenges in health care, these challenges potentially impact on the quality of all our lives. These global grand challenges are huge in scope and address the biggest current concerns of all the world’s citizens.”4

There were three fundamental artefacts that emerged from the evidence gathering, analysis, discussions, and deliberations in the first phase of NEET3: what we have termed as the “NEET Ways of Thinking”, cognitive approaches such as creative thinking, critical thinking and systems thinking that can help individuals think and learn more effectively on their own initiative throughout their lifetime (see Table 1 below); the project-centric curricular construct, and; the concept of cross-departmental pathways that we have termed as “threads”.

Students in their sophomore, junior and senior years pursue threads in areas that address the “new machines and systems” of the future and that are likely to be in demand when they graduate. By participating in the pilot, students will earn an undergraduate degree from the department they are majoring in and a NEET Certificate naming the thread, within the usual four-year duration.

The NEET team NEET is co-led by Edward J. Crawley, Ford Professor of Engineering, Aeronautics and Astronautics and founding president of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology and Anette ‘Peko’ Hosoi, associate dean of the MIT School of Engineering and Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering. The initiative has a full-time executive director, Amitava ‘Babi’ Mitra, founding dean of engineering, BML Munjal University, India, and founding executive director of Academic Media Production Services (now part of the Office of Digital Learning), MIT.

Professors Crawley and Hosoi co-chair the Core NEET Faculty Committee that comprises faculty members from each of the eight engineering departments: Mark Bathe, Associate Professor, Biological Engineering, Geoffrey Beach, Professor, Materials Science and Engineering, Markus Buehler, Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering and Head, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Dennis Freeman, Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering, Kristala Prather, Arthur D. Little Professor of Chemical Engineering, Michael Short, Class of ’42 Career Development Assistant Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Bruce Tidor, Professor of Biological Engineering and Computer Science, and, Maria Yang, Professor of Mechanical Engineering. The Extended NEET Faculty Committee comprises faculty from the other four schools --- School of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Architecture and Planning, Sloan School of Management and School of Science, in addition to engineering faculty. Several task groups have been composed and chartered, including the NEET Projects Group co-led by Daniel Frey, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, the NEET Curriculum Group, the NEET Program Assessment Group, and the NEET Governance Group.

3. Progress and achievements to date and focus areas for 2018-19

3.1 Pilot programs created and students recruited

NEET has proposed a five-year pilot program. The goal in the steady state is to offer about 7-8 threads with about 40-50 students per cohort in each thread, thus addressing about 50% of the undergraduate engineering students. NEET has already launched four pilot threads in just over a year after initiating the program. This has been possible through the work of the Core NEET Faculty Committee, the support of the dean of engineering, the department heads, deans of other schools, the involvement of NEET students and other MIT students, inputs and support from the Extended NEET Faculty Committee, industry (with General Motors as a founding co-sponsor) and from many others including faculty and faculty governance committees and staff. 3.2 Summary of pilot threads launched

Here is an overview of the four threads and their academic teams. Each is led by a faculty member from the host department for that thread. • Launched in Fall 2017 (and continued in Fall 2018): o Autonomous Machines —Autonomy and robotics; crosses departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Faculty team: Founding thread lead Professor Jon How, Aeronautics and Astronautics. Interim thread lead Professor Sertac Karaman, Aeronautics and Astronautics. Professor Sangbae Kim, Mechanical Engineering. Professor Tomas Lozano-Perez, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. NEET Lead Technical Instructor Dr. Greg Long. o Living Machines —Design and build organs on a chip; crosses departments of Biological Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and other technical degrees. Faculty team: Thread co- leads, Professors Linda Griffith, Biological Engineering and Eric Alm, Biological Engineering. Professor Xuanhe Zhao, Mechanical Engineering. Professor Chris Love, Chemical Engineering. NEET Lead Technical Instructor Dr. Timothy Kassis.

• Launched in Fall 2018: o Advanced Materials Machines ---Additive manufacturing, 3D printing, powder and casting processes, advanced polymer processing approaches—all applied to the aerospace, automotive, energy, and health care sectors; crosses departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. Faculty team: Thread lead: Professor Elsa Olivetti, Materials Science and Engineering. Professor John Hart, Mechanical Engineering. o Clean Energy Systems —Design, simulate, and build energy supply systems with lower CO2 emissions; crosses Nuclear Science and Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering. Faculty team: Thread co-leads, Professors Michael Short, Nuclear Science and Engineering and Oral Buyukozturk, Civil and Environmental Engineering.

3.3 Student response and feedback

39 sophomores signed up for NEET in Fall 2017, representing over 5% of the sophomore engineers; 92 sophomores signed up in Fall 2018, representing over 12% of the sophomore engineers This brought the total number of students that signed up for NEET to 131. If NEET were to be a degree program (which it is not), it would be around the fourth largest undergraduate academic major on campus, after electrical engineering and computer science, mechanical engineering and mathematics. These are significantly larger numbers than the number of students that have typically tended to opt for many new academic programs in the past and larger than the enrollment in most majors. We are finding that NEET appeals to students who want to work on a departmental boundary, focus more intensely on project learning and get exposed to areas outside their own majors. In some threads, there is a possibility of deferring their declaration of major from the end of first-year to the end of sophomore year though no student has exercised that yet. It provides an exciting alternative to the current preponderance of interests in computer science and mechanical engineering. NEET students are engaged constructively in their threads and vested in moving NEET forward3. We have already implemented some of their suggestions. They said they would like more projects, for example. Each of the four threads that were offered in Fall 2018 for the second cohort had hands-on seminars and projects from the get-go, i.e., starting in the sophomore fall semester. As can be seen from Table 2 below, the enrollments in the Autonomous Machine and Living Machine threads are strong and growing. There is a viable starting cohort in Advanced Materials Machines, one of the two new threads launched in Fall 2018; its initial enrollment is comparable to that in Living Machines when it was first launched. The Clean Energy Systems thread has however not gained traction, even though our pre-launch inputs and due diligence pointed towards students having a strong interest in clean low carbon energy. To understand this better and get guidance on direction given the wide range of interests in the energy domain, we formed an ad hoc Energy Thread Advisory Committee comprising faculty from across MIT who are in energy-related domains and have also gotten inputs from the student leadership of the Energy Club. Early indications are that the micro-grid could possibly be a “new machine” and that a shift to consumers of energy coupled with hands-on activities such as building new types of solar cells and batteries could be attractive to students, leading to a “Renewable Energy Machines (REM)” type of thread. We also concluded that students would prefer a smaller number of common required subjects and that they wanted sophomore projects with more ‘curb appeal’. The REM thread will explore the possibility of students doing a research project in one of the Low Carbon Energy Centers through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) at MIT which provides undergraduates the opportunity to join established research projects or pursue their own research ideas; these research projects last for an entire semester or continue for a year or more. Another idea to be pursued would be to connect to the local clean tech energy start up community.

3.4 Incorporating the NEET Ways of Thinking --- cross-school initiatives

A major effort of the current school year is building bridges to other schools within MIT. NEET has identified resource experts from across the Institute to help develop pilot modules for the NEET Ways of Thinking3. This is detailed in Table 1 below. Work has begun on four of the Ways of Thinking --- Self-learning, Personal Skills (ethics), Critical Thinking and Creative Thinking (see Figure 1 below), with the goal of piloting them in the NEET seminars and projects in 2019-20 and beyond.

Figure 1: Implementing the NEET Ways of Thinking in Threads with Cross-School Partners

We started with a Self-learning module that was created by the MIT Library; it was pre-piloted with NEET sophomores in Fall 2018. These three modules which were subsequently approved for development grants from the d’Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education, will be piloted in the next year, together with the self-learning module: • Personal skills – Ethics Education, led by the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy and the Gordon Engineering Leadership Program (a pre-pilot was implemented in Fall 2018). • Critical Thinking --- led by the Department of Science, Technology & Society. • Creative Thinking --- led by the Department of Architecture. We are in discussion with the program on Entrepreneurship and Innovation to better integrate those skills into the NEET projects, and we have recently received grant funding to create a digital project environment for this generation of digital native students in NEET. 3.5 External outreach

NEET is already being acknowledged in academic and professional forums as an initiative that is worth watching. Two articles titled “Following the Thread” and “NEET --- New Approach to Engineering Education” were published in the Fall 2018 issue of Spectrum5. A peer-reviewed paper on NEET was presented at the 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah in June 20183. An op-ed piece authored by NEET leadership has been published in a 2018 edition of Mechanical Engineering magazine6. NEET had commissioned an independent consultant to conduct a global undergraduate education benchmarking study7 in 2016, as part of its process of gathering evidence from stakeholders. The report7 was published in March 2018 and has generated world-wide interest; it was covered in a 2018 issue of Professional Engineer8.

3.6 Emergence of NEET as a community

Students in the first NEET pilot cohort were surveyed during Spring 2018, both formally and informally, and listed “being part of a community” as one of the top benefits of NEET. This came as somewhat of a surprise to NEET leadership and faculty as building community wasn’t part of the initial NEET vision or objectives. When we probed this further, the students said that they are excited to be a part of NEET, that they want to develop the NEET identity and brand, and that developing NEET as a community is essential.

3.7 Curriculum, classes, laboratories and academic developmental operations

NEET has proposed a five-year pilot program prior to the formalization of the effort. The current year 2018-19 is the second of those five, and the next academic year 2019-2020 will be the third (see Table 3 below). We have now been in contact for over a year with NEET juniors in the first cohort. Our main contact in Fall 2018 with the NEET sophomores was through weekly NEET Seminars being offered in each of the four threads. These introduced the students to the content of the thread, built community and provided for feedback and voice of the customer (the student). Last year we recruited Lead Technical Instructors for Autonomous Machines and Living Machines. They have been instrumental in conducting projects classes and designing and conducting new seminar classes. We conducted an event jointly in January 2019 with General Motors.

For the first cohort of Autonomous Machines, the Department of Mechanical Engineering generously provided laboratory space at short notice. For the second cohort, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the host department of Autonomous Machines, has made lab space available in the Neumann Hangar and Gelb Lab. One of the goals of NEET is to promote cross-departmental academic experiences in a planned and structured way. This is probably the first time that undergraduates from electrical engineering and computer science, mechanical engineering and aeronautics and astronautics will be working together in aeronautics lab space on a cross-departmental project.

Living Machines also got lab space for the first cohort; the students created a pretty substantial gut-on-a- chip model in spring. The lab space was offered through Professor Linda Griffith. Students spent an average of around six hours per week in the lab during that time. We had mechanical engineers culturing cells and biological engineers creating computational models and chemical engineers fabricating microfluidic devices.

3.8 Evaluation and assessment of the NEET initiative

A strategic sample of stakeholders including NEET lead technical instructors, faculty, senior leadership in engineering and the dean of engineering were interviewed10 in 2018 by the Teaching and Learning Lab at MIT to identify goals of NEET and specific questions to be addressed in future assessments of the program. Across interviews there were many different questions of interest and proposed metrics for success for an evaluation of NEET. Three common themes were: 1. Student feedback (measured by both enrollment/completion and qualitative/quantitative inputs through surveys and through end-of-term course evaluations) 2. Student outcomes compared to those of non-NEET students (performance at MIT as well as in the job market) 3. Sustainability and added-value of the program over traditional offerings Data and feedback have been and are being gathered in the process of piloting and implementing the existing threads. This includes surveys of NEET students in 20189 and 201911, as well as end-of- semester course evaluation data12 . This data will be analyzed in greater detail, however, some of the obvious operational improvements have been implemented in the 2018-19 academic year, e.g., providing greater operational clarity about program requirements across different majors, providing online course roadmaps, increasing the flexibility of offerings, and working towards sorting out conflicts in class scheduling. The learning from these informed the launch of two new threads in Fall 2018 and helped to refine the second offering of Autonomous Machines and Living Machines as well as prepare for implementing pilots of other threads in Fall 2019.

We are working with the Teaching and Learning Lab to develop an evaluation scheme to test the effectiveness and guide our program. We will also be conducting a non-candidate review by external experts in engineering education later in 2019.

3.9 Resource development

General Motors is a founding co-sponsor of the Autonomous Machines thread and has provided funding for 2018-19 and for subsequent years. We have also received additional amounts as gifts from two donors. We are aiming to bring another industry founding co-sponsor for Autonomous Machines at the same level as that of General Motors. Medium to long-term sustainability is critical, and we are now working with resource development teams to identify potential donors for this and other threads. Our goal is to create a corpus, the interest from which will be enough to operate and refine implementation of NEET threads.

4. Learning from 2018-19 and goals for 2019-20

4.1 Consolidating and strengthening Given the overwhelming student response, NEET has decided to consolidate and strengthen its four existing threads. This includes: • Creating the fourth-year program for the first two threads (Autonomous Machines and Living Machines) and inducting a new sophomore class. • Creating the third-year program of the Advanced Materials Machines thread and inducting a new sophomore class. • Relaunching Clean Energy Systems as the Renewable Energy Machines thread and inducting a new sophomore class. This effort also includes piloting the various cross school initiatives in the NEET projects.

4.2 New forms of NEET threads

The department of electrical engineering and computer science is strategic to NEET and is currently engaged with the Autonomous Machines thread and partially with Living Machines. We have had extensive discussions with the department of electrical engineering and computer science leadership and faculty and have decided to develop one or two new pilots for possible launch in 2019-21 by “NEETizing” newly launched degrees that are partnering with the department of electrical engineering and computer science as well as those being planned. A new “NEETized” thread, Digital Cities, will be piloted in Fall 2019; this is based on the urban science and planning with computer science major launched in Fall 2018. Another potential target for “NEETizing” is the new civil engineering with computer science degree program that is being developed for launch in Fall 2019 or later. “NEETizing” in a simplistic sense is designing and creating a project-centric program that offers projects across the two or more departments that are offering joint degree programs. Implementing these “NEETized” threads could help inform the design of computing-related academic programs that may be offered with or by the recently announced MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing.

4.3 Building community

Developing NEET as a community will be a key focus. NEET conducted a survey11 early in 2019 of NEET juniors and sophomores to understand what they mean by community and what their expectations were from “NEET as a community”. What do they see as benefits to individual members? What connections should there be between members? What types of activities should the community engage in and support? What resources could they access? What should the status be? Is the community promoting a transformed ability to learn? We expect to learn from this survey, the experience of the first-year learning communities and other ongoing discussions with the NEET Student Councils (student leadership), and with NEET students. These will then inform the creation of an action plan for implementation in Spring 2019 and during 2019-20.

4.4 The student leadership team

Early in the program, we recognized that the participating students had a high degree of internal motivation to help the program grow and succeed. They also had very insightful feedback to give throughout the first pilot semester. We realized that for the thread to succeed, we would have to take a bottom-up approach where we would encourage the students to shape the program going forward. In order to accomplish that and to give specific responsibilities to interested students, leadership positions were created which were voted on by NEET students. The following Student Councils were then constituted for the two threads piloted in Fall 2017: • Living Machines Student Council: Academic Liaison Officer - Rebekah Costello (biological engineering); Communications Officer - Dorothy Szymkiewicz (mechanical engineering); Community Building Officer - Julie Vaughn (electrical engineering and computer science); Industry Liaison Officer - Ronit Langer (electrical engineering and computer science); Mentoring Program Officer – Ning “Alexa” Guan (biological engineering); MIT/NEET Liaison Officer - Adil Yusuf (biological engineering). • Autonomous Machines Student Council: Claire Traweek (mechanical engineering) - Industry Liaison Officer; Claire McGinnity (aeronautics and astronautics) - Industry Event Manager; Skye Thompson (mechanical engineering) - Academic Liaison Officer; Leilani Trautman (electrical engineering and computer science) - Communications Officer; Darya Guettler (mechanical engineering) - Community Building Officer.

All student leaders would work closely with their respective Lead Technical Instructors, thread faculty leads and NEET leadership to develop short and long-term strategic plans for the thread. They would take on other relevant responsibilities related to their position as the need arose throughout the year. These leadership positions themselves are a way for self-selecting students to gain more direct mentorship and professional development by liaising more closely with leaders at the Institute and in industry.

5. Development of NEET community --- the example of the Living Machines thread

The Living Machines (LM) thread, at its core, is an interdisciplinary research-based program that emphasizes interactions both among students in the thread and between students and the broader academic and industrial communities. We asked the students what their definition of community was, and the consensus was that four attributes defined ‘community’: 1) a common goal, 2) spending time together, 3) shared interests, and, 4) diversity. While devising practical strategies in consultation with the students to address these four points, we realized that the LM community is not limited to just the students in our thread but extended far beyond that. As a result, we defined seven concentric levels of ‘community’ starting from the student cohort all the way to society in general (see Figure 2 below). For each community level below, we tried out a variety of events and programs; we present the intended goals, the logistics, results, summary of feedback and future outlook.

Figure 2: The Different Levels of Community

5.1 Cohort

Students join the program in their sophomore year and remain for a total of three years. As such, every year there is a new cohort of students, and in the steady state we will have three cohorts going through the program at any given time.

Currently, the sophomore and junior cohorts come from seven different majors across the MIT within the schools of engineering, science and architecture. We had all the students enroll in a new for-letter- grade class that we created. The class consisted of seminar-like lectures addressing various topics related to the thread project theme, but more importantly, it was a dedicated time and place where most of the students came together once a week. The fall semester of the class exposed the students to background knowledge required to prepare them for what is the most critical aspect of the class which is a project in spring carried out in small groups that function as small biotech startups. We learned from student feedback that group assignments helped bring the students together, so we adapted the assignments in such a way as to make them be carried out in pairs or small groups. Classes for sophomores and juniors were held separately, and only facilitated community within a given cohort. Going forward, we are restructuring the classes so that there will be one hour per week where all the cohort classes would overlap, and all the cohorts will be together in the same classroom.

5.2 Thread

To enhance community among all the students in the Living Machine thread (irrespective of cohort year) we created a virtual workspace using the Slack platform and a peer mentorship program and organized a variety of social events.

5.3 NEET level

NEET projects do not span multiple threads, so we found it essential to establish a community within the program as the students all shared a mutual non-theme-centered interest in project-based learning. To that end, NEET organized a program-wide pizza social at the beginning of the semester to facilitate inter-thread interactions. Following the lead of the Living Machines thread, Autonomous Machines also established its student leadership team, as detailed earlier. The teams have begun planning inter-thread events for the upcoming semester.

5.4 MIT level

Events organized included lab tours, graduate student and postdoc presentations from various participating labs, individual mentoring by the faculty co-leads and most notably a Lunch & Learn series where interested students got to have lunch and chat in an informal setting with faculty members from the seven majors currently in the thread. We organized a panel-based information session addressing topics surrounding the graduate school application process for the broader MIT undergraduate community. Attendance of thread students was much lower than we had anticipated; the main reason turned out to be conflicts with the classes they were taking. Going forward, we will alternate times/dates for every recurring type of event we hold to make sure more students can attend. We will also be holding multi-faculty/instructor dinners with students.

5.5 Industry

Exposing our students to industry early on in their academic experience will help guide various choices they have to make including internships, whether to go into academia or industry after graduation and what type of company they would like to work for at the next stage of their career. Being able to interact with industry early on would also mean they can shape their time at MIT in a way that would have an immediate benefit towards their next career step. Additionally, given that the nature of our thread focuses on novel research with real-world applications, it was vital for us to make sure students informed their project designs according to industry-validated needs. These interactions would also help clarify where their projects would fit in within a typical industry R&D or product development pipeline. We organized several visits to local companies that fall under the theme of the thread. We also have had multiple industry speakers talk to the students about their companies and organizations including Finch Therapeutics, Amgen, uBiome and the Helmsley Trust. While it was not possible for us to guarantee our students internship positions for summer, we typically facilitated the process by helping them prepare their resumes, talking about various options one-on-one and by sending them pre-screened internships that they were already qualified to apply to. Starting this semester, we will be launching a new mentorship program, where we will assign each interested student an industry mentor from the local pharma and biotech companies.

5.6 Scientific community

We would like LM students to contribute meaningful research to the scientific community and communicate that through peer-reviewed publications. While several of our students have recently become co-authors on research projects they are working on as part of our program within various labs at MIT, our goal is to publish multiple papers that are led by student teams within the thread. A technical paper co-authored with LM students was presented at the Institute of Biological Engineering Annual Conference, St. Louis, Missouri during April, 201913. One immediate contribution that our students have made was working with a microbiome sequencing company to create a blog post that will inform their scientists and community members how to conduct some of the analysis on their own. The blog post and tutorials will be published online soon. The company blog has close to 35,000 subscribers and hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month. In the spirit of integrating with the scientific community, we will be designing all our projects and assignments with the intention of publishing them in one manner or another. Publications will include video tutorials, blog posts, Wikipedia articles and of course peer- reviewed manuscripts.

5.7 Society

Any well-trained engineer needs to be a responsible member of society. In order to do that, they need to understand societal needs and problems, consider the ethical implications of their work and make sure their solution have a meaningful impact. In order to connect with non-scientists, we have begun creating a Living Machines online identity through a dedicated logo, website, social media outlets (including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube) and by making sure that our students communicate what they are working on to the non-scientists including a set of 2-min videos that they created to describe their thread projects. Additionally, we worked with MIT ethics instructors to create a 2-hour module on ethics in engineering and with the Library to create a 2-hour module on self-learning, as part of the NEET Ways of Thinking, that we presented during class for the two cohorts. The ethics and self-learning modules, other NEET Ways of Thinking modules and our online presence will be further expanded in future months. The thread will also be working with the MIT Museum on several upcoming projects that are geared towards communicating science to the public. Finally, senior-level NEET projects will have the students interact with non-NEET community members to gauge the effect of their projects on the public.

6. Developing projects and hands-on seminars in NEET

We find it useful to classify our projects as either synthesis projects or discovery projects based on the predominance of one or more elements.

In a synthesis project, the students utilize their understanding of the foundations to analyze, compute/calculate, design, create, and experiment via self-discovery to develop a physical device/machine that solves a specific problem (or set of problems). A synthesis project usually has a well-defined scope, objective, end-point, and/or conclusion.

In a discovery project, the students utilize their understanding of the foundations to analyze, compute/calculate, design, create, and experiment via new discovery to solve a specific problem (or set of problems), to devise new experiments, to identify novel research fields, and/or to define new research problems. While a discovery project may have a well-defined scope or objective, it usually does not have a well-defined end-point and/or conclusion.

For the student learner, active participation in either a synthesis or discovery project brings the often- theoretical foundations closer to reality where it no longer exists in the abstract. In the NEET program at MIT, the Autonomous Machines thread primarily utilizes synthesis projects, whereas the Living Machines thread primarily utilizes discovery projects. We describe the activities, progress, performance, learnings, and next steps with these two approaches in the following sections, for the Autonomous Machines and Living Machines threads; it is interesting to see the commonalities as well as differences in the two approaches.

6.1 Autonomous Machines (AM) --- projects

6.1.1 Goal

This thread has semester-long projects that occur during the spring semester of the sophomore, junior, and senior years, respectively, and we have tiered the complexity of the projects to increase over this three-year period. In terms of project structure, during their sophomore year the students work on individual projects, during their junior year on small group projects (with 5 to 6 students), and during their senior year on a large project that involves the entire group of students. In addition to these three project courses during the spring term, we have created a fall hands-on seminar series to maintain student contact and continuity throughout the academic year. In the following sections, we briefly provide an overview of each project class.

6.1.2 Project classes in AM:

Sophomore year AM project (spring, 12 units) During their sophomore year, students enroll in the project class Design and Manufacturing I: Autonomous Machines Section, where they each design and fabricate a semi-autonomous mobile robot that navigates and manipulates objects on a gameboard. The gameboard itself has a set of challenges (or problems) the students attempt to solve via the actions of their robot.

Junior year AM project (spring, 12 units) For the junior year project class, Robotics Science and Systems, the students design and implement advanced algorithms on complex robotic platforms capable of agile autonomous navigation and real-time interaction with the real world. The foundational principles in this project include sensing, kinematics and dynamics, state estimation, computer vision, perception, learning, control, motion planning, and embedded system development. The class culminates with a group challenge on a fully functional autonomous system.

Senior year AM project (spring, 12 units) The senior year project class (currently under development), Advanced Autonomous Robotic Systems, will fully engage the students by requiring them to design an autonomously operated device that satisfies stated performance and reliability goals. In this project, the students will develop and create a full-scale polished product with expectations of marketing and selling the product to an end-consumer via a start-up company or an existing autonomous machine/robotics venture. The students in cohort 1 will participate in this class during Spring 2020.

6.1.3 Progress and learning from cohort 1’s experience --- AM projects

To date, we have cycled through 1.5 years with our first cohort (cohort 1) and 0.5 years with our second cohort (cohort 2). For cohort 1, we piloted their sophomore-year project class within a larger population of non-Autonomous Machines students and on a gameboard not specifically designed for autonomous navigation nor autonomous manipulation. Unfortunately, this particular gameboard design presented a multitude of challenges for the students. Nevertheless, nearly every Autonomous Machines student achieved success in designing/constructing their robot for manual operation, and a few achieved success in autonomous dead-reckoning navigation (without the use of sensory feedback).

Sophomore year AM hands-on seminar (introduced in fall for cohort 2, 3 units) Students in cohort 1 said that they wanted hands-on experience from the time they joined NEET, that is, starting the sophomore fall semester. Based on this feedback we provided each student in cohort 2 an unassembled smart car, electronic wiring diagrams, an Arduino UNO microprocessor, an ultrasonic sensor, and an inertial measurement unit. During this weekly 1.5- hour seminar, we required each student to both mechanically and electrically assemble their smart car, and we asked them each to program their smart cars to autonomously navigate a maze. This culminated in a real-time competition, where students were required to autonomously navigate their cars through a new maze.

Since the sophomores in cohort 2 had full course loads in their major courses, we did not require them to work outside of the weekly seminar itself (although, every student decided to work on their smart cars, especially the programming, outside of our weekly seminar meeting). Despite this time limitation, nearly 25% of the students programmed their cars to navigate through the maze autonomously, without assistance, and 50% programmed their cars to navigate autonomously with some assistance. In addition, the General Motors industry champion attended a handful of classes as well as the final competition – this allowed the students some informal interactions with a potential employer who could contextualize exactly what they were doing into roles and how it would look in industry. The champion also saw students working together, asking questions, and solving problems on their own – much more authentic than reviewing resumes. When we compare these results with our progress in cohort 1 (during their sophomore year), we consider the fall seminar an overall success, and we hope this progress translates directly to the upcoming sophomore project class in Spring 2019.

Junior year AM hands-on seminar (introduced in fall for cohort 1, 3 units) For cohort 1, the juniors, we created a weekly 3-hour 3-unit seminar based on their feedback that they wanted more hands-on experience, where the students learned how to program a quadcopter drone to fly autonomously and the rudiments of the Robot Operating System (ROS), a system they will use during Spring 2019 in their project class Robotics Science and Systems. Each drone had a camera system that supplied the required environmental information for autonomous navigation. The juniors all carried full course loads in their majors (like the sophomores), so the weekly seminar represented an additional time commitment for them. Again, despite the time conflicts and limitations, many of the juniors in cohort 1 successfully programmed their drones to autonomously fly around a lighted track.

6.1.4 Student evaluation in AM projects

For the sophomore year project class, we evaluate the students with weekly milestones (11 total), weekly written homework assignments (5 total during the first half of the semester), and weekly physical homework assignments (5 total during first half of the semester). The weekly milestones pertain directly to the design, planning, and execution of the students’ robots, the written homework assignments cover formulae and best practices for designing their robots, and the physical homework assignments provide the students fabrication and programming experience they can implement on their robots.

The junior year project class has weekly laboratory exercises (9 total) that involve assembling and programming a fully autonomous vehicle, robot arm, or other type of autonomous machine. These individual laboratory exercises form the infrastructure of a final challenge that has deliverables consisting of a team challenge proposal, a team implementation plan, a team presentation, and a team final report. We have yet to construct the student evaluation model for the upcoming senior project, and we will report those criteria in a future manuscript. All credit-unit projects and hands-on seminars follow the usual letter grading system at MIT.

6.1.5 What we learned overall --- AM projects

For the projects undertaken thus far in the Autonomous Machines thread, we learned that the following three factors directly influence each student’s overall experience: a) the problem scope, b) the time allotted to solve the problem, and c) how well the milestones were structured. Since the problem (or problems) the students must solve with their robot/autonomous machines lies embedded within the gameboard or challenge itself, we learned that the gameboard/challenge holds the key to student success. In other words, an overly difficult gameboard/challenge enhances the likelihood of student failure, whereas a well-designed and properly structured gameboard/challenge enhances the prospects of student success.

Given the semester system at MIT, the students have a 14-week time period to complete their projects. We have learned that the trial-and-error process, or design-build-redesign-rebuild process utilizes too much of the students’ time. To this end, we need to find ways to reduce the amount of trial-and-error required by the students to build their robots, which, in turn, will provide them more time for autonomous algorithm development.

6.1.6 Next steps --- AM projects

Our next steps for this thread primarily involve enhancing our resources for autonomous robotic development as well as enhancing our students’ expectations of what they can achieve. This process involves not only enhancing our level of expertise and instruction delivery in autonomous systems but also obtaining a firmer understanding of what our students can realistically achieve over a 14-week period. More specifically, for this academic year, we plan to a) reconfigure an existing laboratory space with a gameboard better tailored for autonomous navigation and manipulation, b) focus more attention on creating mechanically robust machines, more suitable for autonomous operation, c) focus more attention on by-passing the limitations of various sensors, and d) focus more attention on integrating sensory input within a run-time computing environment.

6.2 Living Machines (LM) --- projects

6.2.1 Goal

In the Living Machines (LM) thread students undergo multiple short-term projects that all converge into one sizeable 3-year end-goal. In implementing the definition of the projects and logistics for execution, we consider the following four primary goals: establish an interdisciplinary culture; develop transferable skillsets; learn to work in teams, and; develop a research mindset. The LM thread specifically emphasizes research at its core as we combine both discovery and engineering. Students are taught to identify novel research fields, define research problems, devise experiments, learn to document and to consider the ethical implications of their work.

6.2.2 Project classes in LM

Sophomore year LM project (spring, 12 units) In their sophomore year students work together to build a gut microphysiological system (an in vitro gut model). They do intensive literature reviews to determine gaps in current designs and implementations. They then choose one incremental improvement that would be valuable for the scientific community. For example, some groups may choose to improve on one aspect of the design or material. Others may add additional biological components such as a new cell-type or biomaterial. Others might focus on usability or even novel experiments. Students conduct this work in the form of small biotech ‘start-ups’ where they have the opportunity to pitch their ideas in return for our own internal LM ‘currency’ which they use for materials and supplies. They can file internal ‘patents’ to protect certain ideas from other teams, and they have access to 19 volunteer consultants from faculty at the Institute to industry research scientists to researchers in bioethics that they can consult for a fee (payable in our LM currency). In addition to a variety of technical skills that they acquire through this project, they learn project, team and resource management, conduct customer discovery, learn how to manage their time and gain extensive presentation skills. Each team has 4-5 different majors, so they also learn how to communicate with team members outside their field.

Junior year LM research immersion (fall and spring) Students in LM are required to do two semesters of research in their junior year at a Institute research lab, covering a range of disciplines from microfluidics to machine learning to stem cell biology. The goal of this experience is for the students to work on a substantial intellectual unit that they own. The skills, knowledge and experiences they develop are then applied to the LM senior project.

Junior year LM project (fall or spring, 6 units) In addition to the research immersion, students work on small projects in small groups. Currently the juniors are working on three independent projects focusing on: 1) the endometrium microbiome, 2) a dietary interventional study, and 3) a gut-lymphatic microphysiological system. Each of these projects is led by one of the LM instructors.

Senior year LM project (spring, 12 units) This will be offered for the first time in Spring 2020. Students will bring together all that they have learned during their two years and build a sophisticated gut-microbiome microphysiological system with integrated sensors, actuators and well-designed experiments. By this time, they would have developed substantial technical engineering skills, have an understanding of clinical problems, have gained computational and data analysis experience and be familiar with writing a paper. They will be well-equipped to work on a substantial project with greater impact.

6.2.3 Progress and learning from cohort 1’s experience --- LM projects

Our experience so far has been with a small group of pilot students who created a gut-on-a-chip model during the spring semester of last year. Given the small size of the group, they all worked on the same end deliverable but were divided into pairs that focused on individual aspects of the project. The pairs were assigned parts of the project that they would not get exposed to during their course major. For example, the computer science students carried out cell culture, while the biological engineering students helped design the microfluidic device. At the end of the semester, the students had a viable gut- on-a-chip model. While the goal was to publish the result, we were not able to complete the final validation and testing before the termination of the semester. The project, however, will be continued with the same cohort next spring as part of their junior small-project requirement.

6.2.4 Student evaluation --- LM projects

Given the research-centered approach, we stayed away from strict milestone-driven assessments as there is no guarantee that progress will go according to plan. Instead, the students had multiple opportunities during class to present their research updates in the form of 10-minute presentations to the entire group with a 5 minute Q&A. Additionally, although not graded at the time, students were encouraged to maintain a comprehensive lab notebook describing all their plans, experiments, troubleshooting procedures, protocols, results and conclusions. We will be grading the lab notebook in future iterations of the project beginning in Spring 2019.

All credit-unit projects and hands-on seminars follow the usual letter grading system at MIT.

6.2.5 What we learned overall --- LM projects

Workshops and lectures must be segmented To prepare students for their projects, we held multiple workshops both as part of the class they were taking and outside of class. This thread has no required prerequisites, and because of the immense discipline diversity in the backgrounds of the participating students, it meant that there was no one-size-fits-all approach to teaching the workshops and lectures. To address this, we will be holding multiple workshops that are tailored to specific students. For example, there will be a cell culture workshop that is designed for students who have experience with cell culture that will focus on the specific cell types they will be using, while another version of the workshop will be more comprehensive and geared towards students who have never carried out any wet lab work.

Research projects should have some tangible milestones While there was a desirable end goal for the project the students carried out, they found it quite discouraging. Undergraduate students are used to short-term milestones (problem sets, mid- terms, exams) with immediate to short-term feedback. With that in mind, we are breaking the projects down into a multi-step process with defined 4-week success criteria that will give students the satisfaction that comes with accomplishment and thus maintain their long-term interest in the project end goals.

6.2.6 Next Steps --- LM projects

With a larger number of students currently in the new sophomore cohort 2, they will undergo a similar project during Spring 2019 as the one that the current juniors carried out last year but in a very different context. They have been divided into five teams with six members in each team and are currently operating as a recently founded biotech startup. They all have the same end-goal but will approach it in a competitive context where they will be competing against the other teams. The juniors will be carrying out small projects in groups of three. There are currently four projects they can choose from. All the projects are designed to lead towards a peer-reviewed publication if completed successfully. Additionally, there will be an end-of-year research symposium where students from across all cohorts will present their work to the Institute and local biotech community in the form of posters and hands-on demos.

7. Connecting with industry

7.1 Industry --- a stakeholder

Industry was identified early as one of the major stakeholders in NEET for three main reasons – to better understand what they were looking for from MIT engineers, for talent development and for innovation incubation. Senior managers from over forty companies were interviewed and surveyed on the NEET Ways of Thinking, in terms of how proficient(scale of 0-5) they would expect a graduating MIT engineer to be on each of those cognitive approaches, e.g., analytical thinking, creative thinking, systems thinking, critical thinking, personal skills, humanistic thinking and inter-personal skills. Many managers said, for example, that it was no longer a question of training students on “communication skills” or “soft skills”. The ability to sell an idea properly --- marshal technical and other resources within the company and from outside (experts from MIT, other experts, conferences, online, etc.) and cogently present to senior managers and team members --- was a differentiating skill even for entry-level engineers.

7.2 Industry perspective

The primary innovation drivers are to move faster and create more value for customers and shareholders. Within any large commercial organization exists the “incremental innovation” playbook: operational excellence, efficiency initiatives, and innovation tools that help all employees to streamline business operations or solve engineering challenges. “Transformational innovations” are much harder to come by within a large organization. 99% of employees have a primary responsibility to keep the trains running on time; the 1% who officially have the responsibility to innovate then need to leverage the capability of the larger organization to prove and pilot their ideas. By finding new and creative ways to incubate transformational innovation ideas outside of the company, innovation teams within large companies can de-risk transformational innovations before implementing them into the mainstream business. NEET represents a unique incubation opportunity – industry shares validated problem areas of customers along with mentorship, students bring the passion and intelligence around solving problems, and the academic institution has expertise to teach and support the students.

For context, the creation of the NEET program happens to coincide with a renewed focus by academia to implement their innovations in the world. One of the clearest paths to commercialization impact at scale comes from partnering with existing, for-profit businesses. By working with industry partners earlier in the development process, mainly to ensure that research or projects are solving validated problems, academic institutions can set up a more realistic approach to transfer of their innovations to the world.

7.3 Partnering with General Motors

We have initiated one such partnership starting Fall 2018 with a company, General Motors. A strong interpersonal relationship between the company champion, NEET leadership and staff, and the NEET students is essential for a nascent program of this magnitude; agreements are not drafted, project proposals are not standardized, and adaptability remains a primary value. Selection of this company champion (William Dickson, MIT ’14, iHub University Innovation Champion, MIT Lead Talent Scout, General Motors) was strategic in order to create a collaborative, rather than transactional relationship to amplify NEET. This champion was chosen to be well-connected within the large structure of General Motors, constantly aware of changing technical and business needs of General Motors, comfortable working in unstructured environments, and a relatively recent alumnus of MIT. At the end of the day, students are the customers of NEET – any attempt to view the projects as sponsored research or structured engineering development work would result in a negative relationship between General Motors and NEET. This type of working relationship allows for more openness and collaboration than a traditional industry-academic partnership.

The value from NEET to General Motors comes in two primary categories: innovation and talent. As mentioned earlier, innovation requires engaging stakeholders in various areas of the company such as business decision makers, engineering staff, and strategy leaders. This presents a greater challenge up- front in aligning different areas of General Motors with the potential value of NEET but is likely to yield greater value in a more meaningful partnership as the program grows.

Let’s explore how this is being done in one specific thread within NEET, Autonomous Machines. Over the sophomore-senior years, the thread consists of a discrete combination of lecture classes, project classes, non-credit seminars, community building events, students themselves, and its own student leadership team. Each of these presents an opportunity for industry to positively impact the students’ experience in NEET.

The most straightforward of these is to provide subject-matter experts or business leaders to teach the students about specific projects or strategies in the autonomous machines industry – at least twice/semester, General Motors has sent one of these leaders to discuss topics such as innovation and autonomous software engineering or provide general career advice. General Motors was able to bring a pre-production version of an autonomous vehicle to campus14. Because of the General Motors champion’s close relationship with NEET, he was able to contextualize the presentation and vehicle systems to a project the students had just finished working on in the previous semester. This approach has higher student engagement than “open to everyone” events on campus because NEET’s systems- engineering based, project-centric curriculum more naturally aligns with how industry operates. The students have self-selected themselves into a community interested in a specific industry (much like an investment club). This also allows for targeted recruiting of future engineers who will apply themselves in the autonomous field. In summary, these focused industry engagements are meaningful for students and augment the recruiting or branding value for General Motors.

The larger opportunity for value-add to NEET comes in informing project areas for NEET classes. This is not an obvious value-add for General Motors; within the context of classes, students own the intellectual property from any project they create. This rules out the historic themes of industry- sponsored academic projects: subject-specific fundamental research, corporate giving, and capstone projects. General Motors has a plethora of validated problem areas without desirable, viable, or feasible solutions, which can form the basis for class project statements that have a real-world connection. The more people working on problems central to General Motors’s mission, the faster General Motors can move forward on this mission. Incubation of these ideas in universities or startups (with constant positive engagement from General Motors) provides a novel source of ideas. At the same time, one must be careful that academic independence is preserved, and General Motors is not seen to unduly influence projects. The value of these projects is dependent on openness, trust, and interpersonal relationships.

7.4 Mentorship by General Motors --- some examples

A sophomore at the Institute knows the champion’s mentorship in NEET is of great impact. Last winter, this student was among four winners of a hackathon organized by the champion and sponsored by General Motors during the inter-semester break. He and his teammates earned a summer internship that involved automating complex test protocols, working with engineers on autonomous vehicles, and with sensors, and other innovations. Halfway through the internship, this student decided that the NEET Autonomous Machines thread is what he wanted to be in, and he is now enrolled in that thread. Today the champion shares the second-year student’s success story with others as a kind of lesson in nontraditional learning and networking. During the hackathon, the champion shared a real engineering problem with students in a tent built in a parking lot at the Institute in the middle of winter, which resulted in powerful solutions that were well-received by engineering leaders within General Motors who wanted this team to come back for an internship; they created spots out of nothing for them — outside of the ordinary process. Only then did they realize that these were all first-years. At a career fair, they wouldn’t have looked at first-years, there are just too many people.

Finally, the NEET student leadership and other informal relationships between the industry champion and students allow for industry-specific mentorship and a pipeline to industry resources. One initial project from the student leadership was to create a video explaining NEET and its uniqueness – the General Motors champion was able to both provide a unique perspective as an alum/recruiter/industry representative, and connection to high quality video resources showing the industry application of what students are learning in the Autonomous Machines thread. The General Motors champion also shows up informally to classes and project finales to build a relationship with students, mostly to provide mentorship. Other direct connections to industry resources are comparatively low-effort for the industry but provide a very high value to students bootstrapping various projects; all enabled by the direct connection to the students through NEET. In the future, selected student leaders having more direct access to large companies would be a major benefit for student professional development.

7.5 What we have learned from the academia-industry interaction

Thus far, the NEET and industry partnership has been positive, though from the industry’s perspective events tend to move more slowly in academia. We are learning that it’s important to spend time initially to work out expectations from each other, something we didn’t quite do. The biggest theme is “direct access.” The combination of informal and formal relationships directly with students in NEET (who have self-selected into a thread core to General Motors’s future business viability) creates more impactful traditional engagements as well as fertile ground for new engagements. The downside is a more major commitment than traditional academic endeavors, as well as an unproven hypothesis that General Motors can gain meaningful insights or developments into real business/engineering problems. If this hypothesis turns out to be a reasonable one it may open a path to an entirely new strategy for expanding workforce capability. Providing value – for both industry and students – via integration with the holistic education strategy at universities could result in faster technology development for solving the world’s pressing problems.

8. Looking ahead: 2019-20 and beyond

NEET began with an assumption that in the steady state there would be about 7-8 threads with about 40- 50 students in each of the sophomore, junior and senior years of each thread. Implementing the pilots over the past eighteen months or so and the learning from those has led us to modify our original assumptions. We are now focused on strengthening and solidifying the existing pilot threads, building community, and prioritizing opportunities both strategic and tactical. The non-advocate NEET review in 2019 will help inform our priorities and the laying out of the roadmap, as will student engagement and feedback as well as assessment outcomes.

Strategic opportunities include starting to explore new models for threads that span the entire Institute and working out how to “NEETize” existing and planned degree programs, i.e., designing and creating a project-centric program that offers projects across the two or more departments that are offering joint programs particularly those that are offering joint programs with electrical engineering and computer science. The first such “NEETized” thread, Digital Cities, will be piloted starting Fall 2019. We are planning to build on the momentum generated by the release of the global undergraduate engineering education benchmarking study7 by jointly convening with Olin College of Engineering a first-of-its-kind colloquium with the participants being engineering education innovators and practitioners drawn from the institutions identified as current and emerging leaders; this would be held later in 2019. The goal is to then build on this colloquium community in order to articulate and widely disseminate the positive outcomes of the NEET program so that it benefits the global education community. Tactical opportunities include NEET focusing on three key areas --- building community, projects and career opportunities for NEET students. It’s equally important, if not more so, to consolidate, grow, refine, and stabilize the NEET program and projects using continued feedback from students, faculty, and industry. Finally, NEET needs to identify, define, collect, and analyze criteria that track and measure success, again using continued feedback from the NEET community. Figure 3 below is a visualization of how NEET and its threads could be renewed in the steady-state future.

Figure 3: Process Visualized for Renewal of NEET in the Steady-state Future

We have been energized by how many others share with us the determination not to accept current engineering education as “business as usual,” and hope they will join with us in the effort to create a transformational teaching and learning program for MIT, the global engineering education community, and beyond.

Table 1: Partnering with Resource Experts from across MIT to help Develop and Implement the NEET Ways of Thinking in the Threads

WAYS of DESCRIPTION Resource Experts at MIT THINKING

Self-learning The motivation and curiosity, reflected in behavioral patterns, to think and Libraries learn on their own initiative, throughout their lifetime

Making Innovating, by inventing and bringing about artifacts that have never before School of Engineering --- been in existence: Conceiving (understanding needs and technology, and Makerspaces creating concept), designing, implementing and operating products and systems that deliver value

Discovering Advancing the knowledge of our society and world by exploring, identifying, School of Science and generating new learning, often by conducting research that employs scientific methods and leads to new fundamental discoveries and technologies

Interpersonal Engaging with and understanding others: communicating, listening, dialog Sloan School of Management Skills and emotional intelligence, working in and leading teams, collaboration and networking, advocacy and leading change

Personal Skills Initiative, judgment and decision making; responsibility and urgency; School of Humanities, Arts & and Attitudes flexibility and self-confidence; acting ethically and with integrity; social Social Sciences; Gordon responsibility; dedication to lifelong learning Engineering Leadership (GEL) program

Creative Forming something new and somehow valuable, for example by focusing School of Architecture and Thinking thought, incubating new ideas, illuminating them in conscious awareness, Planning and verifying Systems Predicting emergence of the whole by examining of inter-related entities in Institute for Data, Systems and Thinking context, in the face of complexity and ambiguity, for homogeneous systems Society (IDSS) and systems that integrate multiple technologies

Critical and Assessing the worth or validity of something that exists, by analyzing and School of Humanities, Arts & Metacognitive evaluating information gathered from observation, experience or Social Sciences Thinking communication

Analytical Working systematically and logically to break down facts and resolve Departments Thinking problems, identify causation and anticipate results, often by applying theory, modeling and mathematical analysis Computational Using computation to understand physical, biological and social systems by Department of Electrical Thinking applying the fundamental constructs of computer programming (abstractions, Engineering and Computer modularity, recursion), data structures, and algorithms Science

Experimental Conducting experiments to obtain data: selecting measurements, determining Departments Thinking procedures to validate data, formulating and testing hypotheses

Humanistic Developing and exploiting a broad understanding of human society, its School of Humanities, Arts & Thinking traditions and institutions: knowledge of human cultures, human systems of Social Sciences thought, the social, political and economic frameworks of society; and modes of expression in the arts

Table 2: NEET Students Enrolled and Withdrawn

Advanced Clean Autonomous Living Materials Energy Number of students Machines Machines Machines Systems Total Originally joined in 2017-18 (’20) Fall, 2017 31 13 Not Not 44 Continuing in NEET 27 12 applicable applicable 39

Originally joined in 2018-19 (’21) Fall, 2018 57 36 13 3 109 Continuing in NEET 48 31 10 3 92

Table 3. Activities to Develop NEET Threads

Start date NEET Cohort # Activity in 2018-2019 Activity in 2019-2020 (and fall start date) Pilots started in fall Cohort 1 (2017) Design and operate junior Operate senior year including 2017: year in AM and LM. projects in AM and LM. Autonomous Design senior year including Machines(AM) and NEET senior year projects Living in AM and LM. Machines(LM) Cohort 2 (2018) Refine and operate Operate junior year. sophomore year in AM and Refine senior year projects in LM. AM and LM. Refine junior year. Cohort 3 (2019) Marketing and recruiting. Refine and operate sophomore year in AM and LM. Marketing and recruiting.

Pilot started in fall Cohort 2 (2018) Operate sophomore year in Operate junior year in AMM. 2018: AMM. Design senior year projects Advanced Materials Design junior year. in AMM. Machines (AMM)

Cohort 3 (2019) Marketing and recruiting. Refine and operate sophomore year in AMM. Marketing and recruiting. Refine junior year in AMM.

Pilot started in fall Cohort 2 (2018) Plan for redesigning and Operate sophomore year in 2018: Clean Energy relaunching CES as REM. Systems (CES) Renewable Energy Design junior year in REM. Machines (REM) in Fall Marketing and recruitment. 2019. Marketing and recruiting.

Pilots to be started in Cohort 3 (2019) Select and develop Operate sophomore year in fall 2019: “NEETized” Digital Cities. DC. • New Design sophomore year. Design junior year in DC. “NEETized” Marketing and recruiting. thread, Marketing and recruiting. Digital Cities (DC)

References

1. E. Crawley, J. Malmqvist, S. Ostlund, D. Brodeur and K. Edstrom, Rethinking Engineering Education. Springer, 2014. 2. J. P. Kotter, Leading Change, Harvard Business School Press, 1996. 3. E. Crawley, A. Hosoi and A. Mitra, Redesigning Undergraduate Engineering Education at MIT – the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) initiative. Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Salt Lake City, Utah, June 2018. https://peer.asee.org/30923 4. “Grand Challenges Program”, National Academy of Engineering, NAE website (http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/), 2008. 5. “A NEET New Approach to Engineering Education”, and, “Following the Thread”, Spectrum Fall 2018. 6. “Reimagining Engineering Education”, Edward F. Crawley, Anette “Peko” Hosoi and Amitava “Babi” Mitra, Opinion Editorial, Mechanical Engineering magazine, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, July 2018. 7. R. Graham, “The Global State of the Art in Engineering Education”, survey report commissioned by MIT, Phase I (overview), December 2016, Phase II (deep dive into four institutions), March 2018. http://neet.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/MIT_NEET_GlobalStateEngineeringEducation2018.pdf 8. “MIT Study: Dramatic Shifts Anticipated in Engineering Education Leadership”, featured in Professional Engineer magazine, National Society of Professional Engineers, USA, May-June 2018. 9. [Survey of NEET students], Unpublished raw data, January-February 2018. 10. [Interviews of the MIT dean of engineering, senior leadership and lead instructors by the Teaching and Learning Lab, MIT], Unpublished raw data, February-April 2018. 11. [NEET Student Community Survey], Unpublished raw data, January-February 2019 12. [End of semester subject evaluation data on NEET seminars and projects], Unpublished data, Fall 2018. 13. T. Kassis, R. Costello, R. Langer, D. Szymkiewicz, N. Guan, J. Vaughn, A. Yusuf, A. Mitra, E.J. Alm, and L. Griffith, MIT's Living Machines: An Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) Thread, presented at the Institute of Biological Engineering Annual Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, April 4-6, 2019. 14. “MIT alumnus and GM engineer returns to campus to inspire student innovation”, Spotlight on the MIT home page, September 9th, 2018.