#BigBeacon Twitter Chat – Junior Enterprise: Transforming Education – Diversity & Collaboration: Utilizing Different Perspectives

#BigBeacon Twitter chat on Wednesday, June 17, 8pm ET: Join twitter chat (Hashtag: #BigBeacon) regulars as they join CUBE Consulting’s Morgan Bakies (@mmbakies) and Josh Graham (@CUBEuiuc) for a twitter discussion of Junior Enterprise: Transforming Education regarding diversity education for engineers. The usual Socratic questions will be posed and all twitter chat participants will be encouraged to engage in a lively chat on this impactful topic.

CUBE Consulting is a student-led consulting organization at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. CUBE Consulting strives to provide engineering and business students with the opportunity to apply classroom theory to real-world consulting projects with local businesses. As the first Junior Enterprise in the United States, CUBE Consulting provides students with international networking and organizational benchmarking.

In the workplace, engineers constantly work within diverse teams of different ethnicity, different social/economical standing, different degrees, different thought patterns, etc. Currently, engineering education remains mostly homogenous with very little diversity education outside of general education classes and a few team-based projects which may occur in a diverse setting. The lack of interdisciplinary and diversity education within engineering can hinder engineers success in the workplace because they do not possess the skills necessary to work effectively and efficiently in interdisciplinary teams. What do you think? Do you agree or disagree?

CUBE Consulting’s former director, Morgan Bakies (@mmbakies), and Project Manager, Josh Graham (@CUBEuiuc), will be leading the conversation using the #BigBeacon handle. We hope that you will join us for our twitter chat as CUBE Consulting asks:

How can education prepare engineers to successfully collaborate in interdisciplinary teams?

CUBE Consulting hopes to generate a conversation about the place of diversity education within engineering, whether it’s diversity of gender or diversity of field of study. CUBE Consulting invites you to join in on the conversation and tell us what diversity means to you.

As you wait for June 17 at 8 pm EST for our Twitter chat, we hope you’ll consider the following questions:

• What kinds of diversity do you encounter most frequently?
• What are the greatest benefits and challenges involved in working with a diverse group?
• In what ways did your education prepare you for a diverse workplace? Would you improve it?
• How would you increase students’ exposure to diverse perspectives within their education?
• What elements of education promote the most exposure to diversity and interdisciplinary collaboration?
• What is the best way to emphasize diversity education for practical workplace use?
• Why is diversity important to you both as a person and as an engineer?

How to Twitter Chat

If you’ve never Twitter chatted before, don’t worry; it’s very easy! First, get a Twitter account if you don’t already have one, and log in. At 8 PM ET on Wednesday go to twitter.com and type #BigBeacon into the search box on Twitter. Thereafter all the tweets with the hashtag #BigBeacon will show up on your Twitter page. To participate, simply express your opinion by sending a tweet, and be sure to append the hashtag #BigBeacon so other members of the Twitter Chat see you are posting. Alternatively, automate the hashtag search and append feature by using the free service Tchat at http://www.tchat.io.