President's Message

I grew up on a very large farm. My Dad started showing me how to repair mechanical and electrical things at age 8 or 9. I was fascinated by tractors, combines, augers, and automated feeding systems. My Dad progressively gave me more responsibility as I aged through my teenage years. I operated as the second-in-command of the farm and helped determine what tasks needed to be completed each day to keep it operational and successful. My interest in engineering and science started on that farm. The machines helped make work easier and I was always tinkering with something. With this background, you might be asking why I didn't go into mechanical engineering. Well, that's an interesting story. I went to a very small high school with only 14 people in my graduating class. The teachers cared deeply about us and provided a solid foundation in math, science, history, civics, and the arts. By the early 1980s, my high school had acquired a couple of Apple IIe computers. Our teachers started to slowly integrate computer work into our classes and my high school math teacher encouraged me to learn programming in the BASIC language. So, I saved money from my job and bought my own Texas Instruments TI-99/4A home computer so that I could keep learning to program. After high school sports practice, farm chores, and completing my homework I certainly didn't have a lot of spare time to keep learning to program, but I kept at it and I was a pretty decent programmer by the time I graduated from high school. I declared Aerospace Engineering as my major because I knew that modern airplanes had lots of computerized control systems. But, after my first year of engineering training my love of computers and computer programming led me to switch my major to computer engineering.

I didn't have the opportunity to take advanced placement courses or any calculus in high school. My last high school math course was trigonometry. I took a math placement test during university orientation and afterward the math department recommended I take university-level trigonometry before starting calculus. I took their advice and did not start with calculus. I knew that I was not prepared for calculus and that the trigonometry class would give me the skills I needed to pass calculus in my second semester. I also didn't have a high school chemistry class, so I struggled with chemistry in my first semester. I still don't really like chemistry. But I certainly respect those that do.

My first year of college was exciting, challenging, and full of stress. I was a first-generation college student. My parents had taught me the value of hard work, persistence, and dedication to lifelong learning. But they did not go to college. They listened when I told them I felt that so many other students were better prepared than I was, that my academic self-esteem was low, that I was struggling with time management and work-life balance, and that I didn’t know how I would be able to afford school. They offered the best advice they could; it often fell short because they didn’t understand the university, its bureaucracy, its financial demands, or its social structure. But they constantly encouraged me. And I persisted.

I’m telling you this story because it is our life-experience that forms us. And each of us has a unique story to tell. Our diversity makes us creative, collaborative, artistic, and insightful. It also leads to challenging experiences, the biases of stereotypes, and inequities in access. It is human nature to project ourselves onto others and assume they must be just like us. That is far from the truth. As educators, it is important that we embrace the diversity of our students, engage each of them as equals, and offer the same high-quality education to every single matriculated student. We must include all students in classroom dialogue, respect the ideas expressed by every classroom contribution they make, and provide equal access to our knowledge, our time, and to academic resources. We must recognize that each person in our classroom enriches that classroom and we must strive every day to help each student achieve their goals.

My university begins its academic year in September. Each August, I work in my university’s bridge program – an experience for students choosing to slowly adjust to the university and the pace of its courses before beginning the Fall term. These students take a series of classes – both for-credit and not-for-credit – and participate in social programming activities that are designed to help them acclimate to college life. The course I teach in this bridge program is a seminar that introduces the profession of engineering. After a summer away from classes, I look forward to meeting these new engineers-in-training, learning about their background, and enjoying the diversity they bring. This summer, our bridge program ran as an entirely online remote-learning experience because of COVID-19. As an instructor, I continued to see the inequities I first saw when my institution rapidly converted to remote-learning in March. In some households, students had personal computers in their own rooms. In others, students shared a computer with siblings in a shared study space. For some students, broadband access was not reliable. And some students were working jobs to help support their family because others in the family had lost jobs from COVID-19 workforce reductions. Their employment reduced the time they could study for classes. These inequities added stress that was palpable in the student population. Of course, as we continued out of the bridge program into the academic year, I felt the same stresses across the broader university student population.

In 2020, some countries of the world not only faced the health pandemic but also a strong internal reckoning as social justice movements focused on the fight for equal treatment of all people. Many students in these countries have grown up experiencing systemic racial discrimination and divisiveness that has no place in a civilized society. The horrible images we have seen from events in 2020 are shocking and sickening. They acutely refocus us on the decades and centuries of struggle for equality that sadly define our shared history. Systemic racism is systemic. It affects all aspects of life including education. Equal access to pre-university education is not guaranteed and racism within the pre-university classroom from peers and instructors impacts student attrition and student achievement. This complex topic challenges all members of society to think beyond the familiar and embrace the shared experience of the societies we live within. Educators in STEM fields generally lecture about technical things like equations, diagrams, the design process, and system performance. We get lost in the message of science and sometimes we forget the humanity we are working to advance. Together as teachers, we must recognize that life experience shapes confidence, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. And, we must champion inclusiveness and equitability for all.

Our Education Society is a diverse community from around the world. We are people working daily to ensure access to high-quality education for the next generation of engineers and computer scientists. I am inspired by your classroom work, your educational research, and your dedication to continuing to learn about learning. The Society provides a place for you to find like-minded educators, to train, and to contribute in your unique ways. The leadership is strategically positioning the Society to remain the best place for teachers of IEEE fields-of-interest to find resources, tools, and training. In this issue of our newsletter, you will read about new products that we have launched including our new open access publication, our open-educational resources repository, and our webinar series on effective remote instruction. We also preview some products we will launch yet in the remaining months of 2020 including a new webinar series on evidence-based instructional techniques as well as an IEEE Teaching Excellence Hub related to educational topics. There are informative articles about the COVID-19 impact on education in the classroom, reports on awards, highlights from our flagship conferences, and information about how you can find the nearest regional Education Society chapter. I hope you find the articles interesting and useful.

-Russ

Sincerely,
Russ Meier, Ph.D., FIEEE, Professor
IEEE Education Society President
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Milwaukee School of Engineering