One of our faculty courageously stated in our meeting today something to the effect, “I hate to say it. But why do mission statements sound so generic and lack passion and love? As a parent, I’ve seen a lot of these college mission statements, and I’m not sure I’ve seen many that connect with my child or with me as a parent.” Today, we hit that head-on with the help of Dr. Sonia Alvarez-Robinson. We were honored to have such a seasoned strategy consultant work with our School of Engineering to begin our new strategic planning process. If we do nothing else but refine and capture what was shared today in our breakout session, we will have succeeded.
I’m not going to give a rundown of the steps we took today but talk more about why we took them and the energy that we felt. As people shared their personal “why’s” for why we teach to students, for example, someone literally talked about having love for our students and a love of the discipline they are teaching. We also heard comments that empathized with how our students engage with and experience their engineering curriculum at our institution. To that point, another faculty member added that we are starting a new class for first-year engineering students that combines all of our disciplines so that students can be exposed to each one before making a long-term commitment to a major.
We also shared how it is important to give them the fundamentals, but also show them how to work with others in other’s disciplines on big problems that must be solved on a bigger, and sometimes global scale. Some of our Executive Advisory Board members, who themselves are alumni and executives in large engineering firms, stated how important interdisciplinary collaboration in the real world is. Interdisciplinary collaboration is one of our four strategic priorities, along with innovation throughout the curriculum, infrastructure for growth, and inclusion and outreach.
At the end of the session, we gave everyone the chance to share one word about how they felt about our session developed by Dr. Alvarez-Robinson to co-create our vision and mission. Words such as encouraged, informative, insightful, tiring, helpful, collaborative, productive, interesting, contemplative, and inspired were spoken. My word? Energized.
Picture: Many of our School of Engineering Faculty and Staff with Dr. Sonia Alvarez-Robinson (in blue) at our Initial 5-Year Strategic Planning session. (Thank you Michael Kelsh for taking the picture for us.)
© 2023 Andrew B. Williams
About the Author: Andrew B. Williams is Dean of Engineering and Louis S. LeTellier Chair for The Citadel School of Engineering. He was recently named on of Business Insider’s Cloudverse 100 and humbly holds the designation of AWS Education Champion. He sits on the AWS Machine Learning Advisory Board and is a certified AWS Cloud Practitioner. He is proud to have recently received a Generative AI for Large Language Models certification from DeepLearning.AI and AWS. Andrew has also held positions at Spelman College, University of Kansas, University of Iowa, Marquette University, Apple, GE, and Allied Signal Aerospace Company. He is author of the book, Out of the Box: Building Robots, Transforming Lives.
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