#BigBeacon Twitter Chat – Junior Enterprise: Transforming Education – April 15

#BigBeacon Twitter chat on Wednesday, April 15, 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 social skills for engineering workplace success. 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.

The traditional engineering classroom does not encourage the development of professional social skills because students are typically competing with one another to beat the curve on tests and exams. CUBE Consulting and Junior Enterprise strive to create a collaborative atmosphere that supplements classroom education by encouraging students to work together on technical, professional projects. Through projects with CUBE Consulting, students develop their skills in teamwork, communication, networking, and leadership outside of the classroom.

CUBE Consulting’s Director, Morgan Bakies (@mmbakies), and Webmaster, 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 do we teach the skills necessary for success in the engineering workplace?

CUBE Consulting wants to address the lack of professional social skill development within the engineering classroom. It hopes to spark a conversation about developing engineers technically, professionally, and socially.

As you wait for April 15 at 8 pm EST for our Twitter chat, we hope you’ll consider the following questions:

• What makes an engineer successful professionally?
• What role do social skills play in finding this workplace success?
• What types of social skills should an engineer develop to be successful in the workplace?
• How did you learn or are you learning these skills?
• Did you learn any of these skills in college? How did you learn them?
• What is the best method to teach engineering students key social skills for the workplace?
• What is one social skill you wish you could have learned starting your engineering career?

For more information on CUBE Consulting’s effort in experiential education, please check out the paper published by ASEE this past June here.

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.

Thank you and CUBE Consulting looks forward to seeing you on Wednesday!