Students frequently express an appreciation for “real” interaction with professionals in their courses, and the benefits of industry engagement through class projects, senior design projects, and internships are well known. It is less clear what students “get” out of a lecture being replaced by a talk from a professional. Traditional barriers to having such visits are diminished when classes are held partially or wholly online, and a concerted effort was made in the fall of 2020 to provide students the opportunity to hear from and interact with a significant number of materials engineers. In a semester-long Engineering Materials and Processing course, six engineers visited in the second half of the course to discuss issues and innovations in materials design and processing. Students filled out a survey at the end of the semester to determine what personal and professional connections are made and retained. The results of these surveys will be presented along with suggestions for implementing a similar program in other courses.
Alison K Polasik received a B.S.E. degree in Materials Science and Engineering from Arizona State University in 2002, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from The Ohio State University in 2005 and 2014, respectively. She has been part of the adjunct faculty at Columbus State Community College, and was a full-time lecturer at OSU from 2013 until 2015. From 2015 to 2018, she was an assistant professor of practice in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at OSU. In Autumn 2018, she joined Campbell University as an Associate Professor of Engineering.
Dr. Polasik's research interests include modeling of microstructure-property relationships in metals, assessment of educational outcomes, and engineering-specific epistemology in undergraduate students.
Dr. Polasik is a member of ASM, TMS, and ASEE.
Anastasia Rynearson is an Assistant Professor at Campbell University. She received a PhD from Purdue University in Engineering Education and a B.S. and M.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her teaching experience includes outreach activities at various age levels as well as a position as Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Kanazawa Technical College and Future Faculty Fellow teaching First-Year Engineering at Purdue University. She focused on integrated STEM curriculum development as part of an NSF STEM+C grant as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant through INSPIRE in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. Her current research interests focus on pathways into engineering and identity development.
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