#BigBeacon Twitter chat – Sept 23 – Junior Enterprise: Transforming Education Mitigating Mistakes: Failure Isn’t Necessarily Failure

#BigBeacon Twitter chat on Wednesday, September 23, 8pm ET: Join twitter chat (Hashtag: #BigBeacon) regulars as they join CUBE Consulting’s Josh Graham (@CUBEuiuc) for a twitter discussion of Junior Enterprise: Transforming Education regarding the climate of mistakes and failures in education. 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.

After four (or more) years of hard work, many engineers find themselves in a totally unfamiliar environment: the working world. Although some of the knowledge they’ve gained through their classes is specifically relevant and useful, much of the training they receive is less in the knowledge they gain than it is an exercise in learning how to learn. Often, though, the grading system measures how well they’ve learned the material, not the skill, and these grades are highly unforgiving. This leads most students to work incredibly hard to avoid making mistakes, which can lead to a lack of emphasis on a crucial skill in the working world: mitigating the damage of mistakes once they’re made. What do you think? Do you agree or disagree?

One of CUBE Consulting’s Project Managers, 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 navigate a situation after having already failed in some way?

CUBE Consulting hopes to generate a conversation about the value of mistakes as lessons and failures as learning experiences. CUBE Consulting invites you to join in on the conversation and tell us what these mean to you.

As you wait for September 23 at 8 pm EST for our Twitter chat, we hope you’ll consider the following questions:

• Do you feel time pressured tests are an accurate way to judge a student’s  aptitude as an engineer?
• What was your first major failure in engineering education and what were the consequences of it?
• Did that failure teach you anything and if so, what? 
• Have you learned more from your failures in your career than in your education?
• Should mistakes in college be made less punishing? Why or why not?
• Would it be better for students to spend less time avoiding mistakes and more time learning to mitigate them? If so, how?
• How do we teach students to handle mistakes with grace?

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.