The problem: The U.S. faces a chronic shortage of engineers.
The solution: Invite 1,000 middle school students from across Texas to SMU on a Saturday morning, crank up the music, team them with a professional engineer, give them a design challenge to complete under a deadline and recognize the winners in a rock-concert atmosphere.
Visioneering 2012, set for Saturday, March 31 at SMU’s Moody Coliseum, seeks to help reverse America’s engineer shortage by presenting engineering as a fun, exciting, and challenging career opportunity to students who will need a strong background in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) coursework to become an engineer.
The SMU Lyle School of Engineering is hosting the Visioneering event for the 12th year, partnering with Texas Instruments, Fluor, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, the Pettinger Foundation, and Time Warner Cable. The event runs from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Moody Coliseum (6024 Airline Road, Dallas) and classrooms throughout the SMU campus.
“If we want to reach the next generation, we need to start years before college, bringing math and science to life for students,” said Tammy L. Richards, P.E., Associate Dean of the SMU Lyle School of Engineering.
U.S. Education Department data show that overall college graduation levels the past two decades have grown about 50 percent, with the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded increasing from 1.1 million in 1990 to 1.6 million in 2010. During that same period, however, the number of engineers U.S. colleges and universities annually send into the workforce has virtually stagnated at around 120,000.
By contrast, about 1 million engineers graduate each year from universities in India and China—a disparity that the White House Council on Jobs and Competitiveness says threatens to slow the U.S. economic recovery, stunts long-term competitiveness and leaves technology firms in a skills crisis.
Visioneering 2012 kicks off with a high-energy pep rally for the 1,000-plus middle school students and their teachers from across the D-FW area and from as far away as Houston.
The opening rally will also feature a brief keynote by Rachel Goodman, a senior systems engineer at Raytheon Company, who is a visiting lecturer at SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering, where she obtained her undergraduate and graduate degrees in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Her most recent assignments for Raytheon involved monitoring and security applications along international borders, airports and other places of high security importance.
The opening rally will be followed by the announcement of the design challenge, for which students will break into teams with a professional mentor. A technology expo and the closing awards ceremony will round out the morning.
Exposing students at a young age to careers in science and engineering—and providing hands-on experiments and real-world applications of engineering—is vital to encouraging them to pursue higher education, said Dean Richards, noting that the SMU Lyle School offers similar sister programs, The Infinity Project and Camp for Girls.
“We want students to know that a career in engineering is awesome,” she said. “Visioneering is designed to show how engineers are creative, smart and very cool.”