The Non-technical Essentials of a Technical Education

Scaffold with mindsets and habits before you fill with content and skills

The most important things you learn as an emerging adult are not the technical skills and knowledge related to your field of study, but the mindsets and habits that are the foundation on which to build them. Given how much we talk about college as a place to “learn how to learn,” it’s shocking how little time we spend helping students build the foundation to help them learn and grow most effectively.

Today I want to share some thoughts on what these mindsets and habits are and sketch some ideas on how you can build them in your own life. While these are specifically geared toward folks in the season of emerging adulthood with aspirations for careers in STEM, I think these mindsets are valuable for everyone. Above all, I’m writing to myself to remind me to put first things first.

Here’s a brief roadmap of where we’re going:

• Cultivate curiosity.

• Remember you are an embodied creature.

• Write to learn what you think.

• Think about the why and the how, not just the what.

• Build systems to cultivate your character.

• Create space for regular reflection by replacing instead of removing.

What I’ve got to say here is too much to tackle in one post (it’s already too long!) so I’m planning to try something new and explore this as a multi-part series. This week I’ll try to give a lay of the land and explain what I feel are the most urgently missing parts of our technical education curriculum. While this will obviously be from my perspective as an engineering educator, I think the broad themes are applicable and needed across all STEM disciplines.

In future weeks, I’ll explore each of the individual sections in more detail and unpack how we might address them.

I appreciate you holding this space with me as I think out loud about these issues. I’m sure that there will be elements I’m missing or not seeing, and if anything comes to mind I would greatly appreciate it if you would reach out via email or leave a comment below to let me know. Thanks for being here!

Get critical. Then get curious.

Every year I find myself sitting in fall design reviews for the students in our Engineering Clinic program trying to find the source of the disconnect.

A core part of the Engineering Clinic program and the broader mission of Harvey Mudd College is to prepare the next generation of leaders in STEM fields with the ability to understand the impact of their work on society. But when asked to analyze and critique their projects, they’re often caught flat-footed.

It’s not that they don’t care. In addition to being a core part of the Harvey Mudd mission statement, it’s also deeply aligned with their own personal values. I know from talking to them that almost to a student, they care deeply about making the world a better place. But year after year I hear the same surface-level analyses: anything funded through the Department of Defense or sponsored by defense contractors is bad, and technologies designed to improve human health, address sustainability goals, or tackle climate change are good. Worse, sometimes you can feel something adjacent to a hoodwinking taking place. The impacts being discussed aren’t really the heart of the issue, and everyone in the room, including those presenting it, knows it.

Curiosity is the intellectual super-virtue

There are a few things going on under the surface here. First, it’s not that those general inclinations about the ethical implications are wrong. It’s certainly much easier to find problematic aspects of drones than of a new medical assistive device for a certain population of users. But it’s just too easy (and dare I say a bit lazy) to take the impacts of these technologies at face value and buy into the marketing and hype. The engineers we need for a world in which humans flourish must not think just about solving the what of a problem, but deeply understanding the why and the how.

By and large, the reason engineers don’t engage with these ideas in more depth and nuance is that we don’t know how. It’s easy to focus on the technical details of a new system they're building. It’s much harder to thoughtfully tackle the many ways that technologies can shape our communities and society at large, especially when we don’t have frameworks to help us think through the impact of our work.

As I’ve been reflecting on the first four and a half years of my work teaching engineering at Mudd, I’m increasingly convinced that we need to revisit the focus of our program learning outcomes. So much of higher ed, at least in the US, seems to be squarely focused on content, preparing students to be effective cogs in the workplace machine. What we’ve lost in the process is a focus on cultivating curiosity, wisdom, and helping students to cultivate the mindsets and habits that will help them flourish for their own good and the good of the people within their spheres of influence.

To be sure, technical excellence is important. The fields of science and engineering offer many opportunities to help address the issues that cause human suffering and pain. But they simultaneously create the potential to exacerbate these issues. In other words, these skills give us power, along with all of its benefits and pitfalls.

Our efforts to train students with the technical skills to innovate must be coupled with the wisdom to know how to evaluate the potential impact of their work on society. The frontiers of technological development are fraught with ethical and philosophical questions. We need to be able to answer not only the what and the how, but the why as well. Not only that, but we need to attend to the fact that this wisdom in the world springs from the character and virtues of individuals.

The fact that we award scientists and engineers Doctors of Philosophy is becoming increasingly ironic. The closest many get to anything resembling philosophical inquiry in the courses required during their training is a seminar course on the responsible conduct of research. This was true of my PhD and I imagine of many of my colleagues. Most of these aren’t much more than a crash course in a code of conduct (e.g., don’t fabricate data) and ethical treatment of human and animal subjects. Nowhere is there any engagement with what the whole thing is for to begin with.

We can help to solve this problem by giving students questions and frameworks to see their work through. But before we start to fill in the pieces of content, we’ve got to get the mindsets in place. Without instilling and fostering curiosity and an intrinsic love for learning, all our efforts to try and teach skills are only going to be half what they could be.

Remember you are an embodied creature

The first stop is an obvious but often overlooked one: you are an embodied creature. This means that how you treat and care for your physical body matters. Sleep, exercise, and proper nutrition all play a part in putting you in the position to do your best intellectual work.

If you’re feeling unable to focus or burnt out, the first place to look at how you are taking care of your body. If you’re chronically sleep-deprived or not eating well it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to think well.

We all have seasons where we attend more closely to our physical health but playing around with productivity hacks before trying to get the foundational elements like sleep and nutrition in place is a waste.

Write to learn what you think

As I reflect on my own educational journey one of the things I regret most is that I didn’t build a consistent writing habit until a few years ago. Having a deadline to publish something every week is a forcing function that keeps me thinking and processing information.

It feels that more often than not the way we teach writing builds resentment toward the practice, especially among those inclined to STEM-fields. But writing is one of the best ways to learn to think well.

It’s not easy work. I’ve heard the apocryphal Hemmingway quote a few times this week where he is attributed to have said: “Writing is easy. You simply sit down and bleed on the page.” It might not have been authentic to Hemmingway but if you’ve written for any period of time you feel the truth in that.

Writing is hard work. But that’s because thinking is hard work. Turns out that the most valuable and worthwhile things in life usually are hard. While building a consistent writing habit is a valuable skill for anyone, it is especially valuable for those in STEM fields, especially when you’re trying to understand how technology operates within and shapes society.

Build foundational philosophical literacy

Basic literacy in philosophy is a critical foundation for helping us to think deeply about the work we do in the fields of science and engineering. Our work in technical fields is built on philosophical beliefs but oftentimes we don’t fully appreciate how deeply our goals and desires for our work are built on our answers to the underlying philosophical questions. We all operate with answers to these questions—the only real question is whether our answers are explicit or implicit.

The reason that a foundation in philosophy is important is to bring these answers into the light so that we can examine them. Without thoughtfully exploring what we actually think about these questions and how they intersect with the overall goal of our enterprise, it is impossible to move forward with wisdom. At best, we’re operating out of a place of trust in the vision set by the others around us.

You needn’t look far to see how these philosophical issues bubble up. Take autonomous vehicles for example. In very real ways, the algorithms being developed are making philosophical judgments. The trolley problem is no longer a thought experiment; the car careening towards you has already decided whether or not the best choice is to hit you to avoid an alternative outcome.

Philosophical theories also help to drive the way that institutions operate. Over at his Substack

The Honest Broker

just a few weeks ago

Ted Gioia

wrote an excellent piece about his own experience with the framework of effective altruism. At its core, effective altruism is about using logic and reason to find ways to benefit others as much as possible with the resources at our disposal. Without at least a basic grounding in philosophy, you’ll be unable to locate effective altruism among the utilitarian thinking downstream of John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and others.

The point here isn’t really whether you agree with Ted’s points. It’s that to agree or disagree at all you’ve got to know something about philosophy. As we’ve seen in recent days, whether from the FTX collapse or the recent turmoil at OpenAI, these philosophical convictions have real-world consequences.

How you answer these questions matters. It’s critical that we equip ourselves and our students to wrestle with them well.

Create systems for personal development

A basic fluency in philosophy helps us to think well about the nature of reality. The answers to the questions posed by philosophy are important in their own right, but they also shape and deeply impact our personal lives.

This is where worldview enters the picture. Worldview is adjacent to philosophy but with a different goal. Instead of a field of inquiry “out there,” worldview is much more personal. It describes the way our experiences, values, and beliefs combine to shape the way that we understand and act in the world around us. Our worldviews are built on top of our philosophical convictions.

Worldview matters. It’s the lens through which we interpret our experiences every day and make important decisions about our lives and how to lead them. It helps us decide how we spend our time, if we decide to marry or start a family, the career we pursue, and the way that all of those aspects of our lives contribute to our overall satisfaction.

A core part of most educational institutions is to help their students grow as whole persons and become lifelong learners. I think you would struggle to find a school that doesn’t have this as one of their aims.

This is certainly a noble aim. In many situations, the raw materials for this to happen are there: caring faculty, staff, and administrators, challenging and thoughtfully prepared course material, and intentionally designed structures to foster community. But all of these resources are worthless if a student doesn’t embrace them.

While there are no easy solutions here, I do think that some relatively small interventions early on can make a big difference. Life-long learning is built on habits. If we’re not teaching these, where are students going to learn them?

• How learning works (e.g., don’t just read the textbook)

• How to manage your time

• How do you find a career that allows you to flourish with your unique skills and interests?

• How to cultivate a life of the mind

But even more than any of these specific goals, the most important part is to help students take ownership of their own development within a system of iterative improvement. It’s one of the reasons that I feel so strongly about the power of the prototyping mindset. Helping students to overcome the hurdle of embracing failure, reflecting on the lessons they learn from their prototypes, and iteratively working to improve is a key ingredient to pursuing any of these valuable long-term goals.

Create space for thoughtful engagement of what a life well lived looks like

The pace of life seems to grow ever faster. I think we all feel this, but I get the sense that students are especially conscious of this. They feel the pressure to cram in as many activities as possible, looking to fill out their resumes as fully as they can before launching into their careers.

There is a lot of conversation at Mudd about how to address this. I imagine that similar conversations are happening elsewhere. It seems that many of the ways that we are attempting to create space for students are supply- instead of demand-side solutions. Over my time at Mudd we’ve had conversations among the faculty about trying to create more space in students’ schedules by reducing or shuffling their course load. We’ve cut courses from the core curriculum and shifted others around.

This is well and good. It’s certainly something we should be thinking about. We’re all prone to the Christmas Tree effect. We need to think about SNR and decide where to prune.

But considering only structural external solutions is destined for failure unless we also consider the cultural forces at bay. Even as we make adjustments to the formal degree requirements and change our advising suggestions, the things that students hear from their peers often carry more weight.

In addition to carving out more space for students to reflect and grow, we need to fill the space we make with something that will help them develop the habits we wish to instill in them early on. Otherwise, we create a vacuum that students will simply fill with another resume item.

This isn’t to say that those pursuits are not valuable or worthwhile. We should do what we can to help support our students. To do otherwise is to coddle them and treat them without the respect they deserve. But if we want to show them a better way toward the practices that lead to a life of fullness and flourishing as opposed to busyness and a continual yearning for more, we need to model that for them and help to set an example for the type of people we want them to become.

There are no easy solutions here, but one of the top items on my list is helping them to foster their own life of the mind and a deep sense of curiosity. One of the best ways I know to do this is by encouraging them to read widely, write to figure out what they think, and discuss those thoughts in community with others, especially with those who will challenge and push them to think more deeply and consider other perspectives.

Thanks for hanging with me through a post that turned, at places, into a soapbox-style rant. In future weeks I hope to unpack some of these pieces in more detail and explore ways I have seen these things taught well and ideas I have to teach them in the future.

Got a comment or a suggestion for something you should have made the list? Please leave a comment!

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The Book Nook

Thinking that the situations we face today are altogether new is a common fallacy. I’ve been reminded of this lately while reading Alone Together by

Sherry Turkle

, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the Founding Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self.

Dr. Turkle has long been one of my favorite writers thinking about technology and society. Published in 2011, Alone Together weaves together Dr. Turkle’s reflections and learnings from her studies of children’s interactions with technological toys like Tamagotchi, Furby, and My Real Baby.

While I’m only a few chapters in, the parallels between Dr. Turkle’s reflections in the 2010s and the world of artificial intelligence and large language models we are living in today are striking. She artfully and evocatively draws out the ways that we think of technologies as living and what it means for something to be “alive enough.”

I’m sure this will prompt some future essays down the line, so stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.

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The Professor Is In

This last week was pre-registration for the Spring 2024 semester at Harvey Mudd and it was an exciting one for engineering. We saw the enrollment in our core sophomore engineering classes E80 (Experimental Engineering) and E72 (Engineering Mathematics) increase by almost 50%. It’s been a challenge trying to resolve the many scheduling conflicts downstream of such a drastic jump in year-over-year enrollment, but we are thrilled to welcome more students to the major!

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Leisure Line

Turkey cookies are a Thanksgiving staple in the Brake household. Featuring my favorite sugar cookie recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction. The Fruit Roll-Up feathers and mini-chocolate chip eye make for an easy and fun cookie decorating project with the kiddos too.

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Still Life

Managed to get out with the two oldest kiddos for a hike yesterday and it was a beautiful day. I never get tired of looking at the beautiful San Gabriel Mountains that tower just north of us.