The Illinois Entrepreneurial Network recently sent the following letter to its membership:

Dear IEN Members,

As we recently mentioned, we have partnered with iFoundry.  Several IEN members attended the iFoundry town hall meeting conducted by DSAC (Dean’s Student Advisory Committee). 

IEN strongly supports the goals of iFoundry, which is to bring much needed change into the engineering curriculum.  However, it is important to realize that change will never happen unless the students voice their concerns.  Our efforts have to start from the ground up, and gain the support of students.

If you are seeking inspiration, check out Olin College.  This is an example of a school that is open to change and rejects the status quo.  Kaplan and Newsweek have projected Olin College as one of America’s new Ivy League schools and taking a look at their structure makes this type of assumption very easy to make.  What we are dealing with is our own University being perfectly designed to resist change, so we must break that barrier as the student leaders at UIUC.

A few concerns raised by students this evening:

1) Entrepreneurship should be strongly and broadly encouraged in engineering.  Universities should not be expected to turn students into employees; it should challenge their thinking and require thinking outside the box.  We have pictures of successful entrepreneurs hanging up on the walls of engineering buildings, but they had to seek out those skills on their own time.  The University brags about having those types of innovators, but they don’t do much to encourage it.

2) The existing courses, such as those in Computer Science, need to be updated to bring more interesting and relevant content.  For example, iPhone Application Development is now being offered as an open course by Stanford University (CS193P), but UIUC doesn’t have a course on this, and continues to emphasize more traditional languages like Java and C.  MIT has open courses.  So does Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, Yale, and Princeton.

3) Some of the requirements of the degree programs are arbitrary, and students are forced to take classes they’ll likely never use or need (such as physics or western civilization).  The solution to this problem is to give the student alternatives, both technical and non-technical humanities and social science options, that are coherent, relevant, and interesting rather than forcing arbitrary general education requirements on them.

4) It is far too difficult to take classes outside of your major.  A lot of this has to do with the rigid structure of courses and prerequisites you’re expected to take.  As one student mentioned, there is little flexibility to even take classes of interest to you.  You go to a website or talk to your advisor, and you basically have no say in a majority of what gets assigned to you.  That’s not to say we want everyone to be forced to take more entrepreneurial or creative classes, for example, but we want to have the option.  It should be open to us.

5) We are not interacting with each other enough.  We don’t encourage enough group work and we don’t encourage interaction among students of other focuses.  In a company, large or small, you don’t have a team of just engineers.  An effective company works as a single body that functions together.  I think Finland is a great example that shows how effective techniques like reciprocal learning are, and we don’t see enough of that in our engineering classes.

IEN wants to support iFoundry, so we will be asking any students who have similar concerns to help provide video responses of what types of things current engineering students would like to see changed.  The College of Engineering sponsors iFoundry and is eager to hear what you think.   Please contact jmtame@gmail.com if you are interested in providing feedback.

Thank you,

Jared Tame
Member of Illini Entrepreneurship Network

More information about IEN is available on its website (here).