Let’s solve real world problems by flipping the education model

A few days ago, I wrote a blog post about how I believe we need to flip the current education model on its head and change the way we teach; I believe we need to focus more on solving problems and teaching for the real world. I received a lot of great feedback from friends and others online which has driven some critical thinking. It has caused me to come up with a more concrete plan of what I think this should look like.

If you recall back to my post on solving world problems, I think that’s what we need to think about at its core. We need our students to start thinking about solving problems and all the skills they are going to need to learn to tackle those problems. Then we need to teach them the skills they need to do it.

At my previous job, I would often interview candidates for software engineering positions. It has been a few years now and there are only a couple candidates I can remember off the top of my head. The reason I can remember interviewing them is because they had built or worked on a project that they were super passionate about, and often solved one of their own problems in life. Then they were able to either show me that product in person or talk about it in so much detail that you really got a sense of their passion for what they had built.

One interview in-particular stands out in my mind; it was a woman who had a great personality but as we came to talking about her experience, she pulled out her laptop and showed me what she had built. She was a fitness and nutrition enthusiast and found it difficult to manage her fitness and eating schedule by herself, so she built an application to do it for her.

She showed me how she built the application from the ground up. She knew how the front-end user interface worked, she knew how the backend server worked; she knew everything, because she had built it herself. It made for an interesting conversation and a great interview; and guess what? We offered her a job.

It is people like these that I as an engineer want to hire. I want to see someone that takes the initiative to build something that they can show off and be proud of. And in the process of building whatever that is, it will make you an expert at it.

So as I was thinking about all these ideas, I think back now and say to myself, geez why didn’t I think of that? And why don’t the universities understand? At Virginia Tech, we did have senior capstone classes that was part of a final project. However, it was only one semester, and that is not enough to come up with an idea, design it, and built it to completion. And it is definitely not enough to become a world expert at it.

We should be asking our students to come up with a problem or problems they want to solve from day one as freshman, then they will have 4 years to solve it. They have the best resources available to them because they are at a university with all sorts of knowledge, they just have to take advantage of it. Then as their college career progresses, they keep working on that project and over time it turns into something very useful, and they know everything about it, every detail.

Now I’m not naive enough to believe that every student is going to know what problem they want to solve from day one. That’s actually what college is about, figuring out what you want to do. But I also think we can do better, we can plant the seed with ideas from past students and start explaining how each class and field you are going to study during your college career relates to problems in the real world.

I’m hoping that this will provoke some critical thinking in the minds of the students. I’m also hoping that students may think twice about changing majors if they have a bigger purpose.

I know I changed my major from computer engineering to electrical engineering because I ran into some trouble during an early programming class. Had I had a bigger purpose to the degree I was pursuing, maybe I would have stuck out the original major longer; but at least I continued through to finish with a degree in engineering.

Let’s take Nomaytk Media Manager for instance, a program I have been working on for over a year. I know personally how every single line of code for Nomtayk works because I wrote it all, every last line. If I look back at my git repository, my first commit was on Oct 24, 2016 and it contained about 20 lines of code; and it didn’t really do anything. Now a year and 3 months later, it contains thousands of lines of code, it solves a real world problem I have in my life, and I know everything about it.

If I were to go out tomorrow for an interview, this would be the crown jewel of what I talk about to the interview. That’s because it is something that I built, that is mine, and that I’m proud of. And it showcases all of my knowledge that I’ve accumulated over my engineering career to figure out how to build it.

That’s the thing about school, the senior capstone design class shouldn’t be the start, it should be the final push of your project before graduation. It should be the semester where you get your product ready for the world. It takes much more than just a semester to get to something meaningful built. Each class we have to take in school should build up those skills over time give you the knowledge to solve those real world problems.

I think this mentality is more normal in graduate school, but I think it is a bit lost on students in undergrad. I think its also a bit lost on people in general when they are trying to change their careers and build a better life for themselves. So this is just the start, I’m formulating the ideas of what to build and how this should look, but I think I’m onto something. And I’m hoping these initial tutorials will turn into something much more.