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April 2006
Students Fight to Build a Green Future
By Carrie McGourty
April 26, 2006
On Earth
Day 2006, there’s something on the minds of young architects
and engineers, and it’s a problem that won’t leave
them alone. The challenge to come, they say, is the future
of construction and energy practices. And these students,
ingrained with problem-solving skills, are using politics
to find solutions.
Their cause? Sustainability. And students
are organizing at the university and national level to
fight for green building and renewable energy to be instated
on their campuses. Throughout the United States, politicians
and universities are quickly finding that student leaders
have the clout to influence decisions concerning energy and
construction on campuses. We’re not talking chump change
here: school construction is a lucrative, billion-dollar market.
Students at the University of Colorado,
for example, fought for construction of campus buildings to
be LEED
certified green and to be conscious of labor issues. On
the West Coast, a student-run campaign called RenewCSU
succeeded in mandating that the California State University
system require all new building with major renovations to
meet LEED standards, and to meet 20 percent clean-electricity
standards by 2010. And at colleges such as the University
of Oregon, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, green
building has dominated construction, largely in part because
of student activism.
“These are the graduates that are
going to be shaping the industry within half a decade, so
it’s important for industry to keep an eye on these folks,”
says architectural-engineering student Tylor Middlestadt.
He’s president of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s student
government. He used that position as a bully pulpit to advocate
building of new, “green” dorms at his school. “If
there is no opportunity for these innovative students to thrive
within the industry, then they’re going to create their
own enterprises and find ways to implement their ideas,”
he says.
The New York Times reports
that more than 110 colleges nationwide have instituted green
building structures to be certified by the U.S.
Green Building Council , thanks largely in part to the
work of impassioned students and supportive faculty and designers.
The Environmental Protection Agency
says
that the number of universities investing in renewable (or
“green”) power continues to grow as well.
Even California Gov. Schwarzenegger
(R) acknowledged this trend last
week, when he came to the University of California at
Davis to watch the Clean Energy Fund present a $1 million
grant to the school. The money is earmarked for research in
green building and renewable energy.
Students are demanding to be heard.
During an April 7-9 conference, more than 500 students met
at Yale and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville to strategize
ways to bring renewable energy to their campuses.
“When an entire generation embraces
a cause … then there’s a pretty strong shift in
the center of gravity where the industry is going to be headed,”
says a hopeful Middlestadt.
So how important are communication skills
anyway?
By Carrie McGourty
April 13, 2006
It’s quite simple,
experts and academics say (54kb, )
that if an engineer can’t communicate and work well with
others then the world will have some major problems getting
stuff done. Especially as global projects force people to
bridge the divide between countries, cultures and foreign
tongues, these skills could make a break a person’s success
in the industry.
ABET, Inc. (the recognized U.S. accreditor
of college and university programs in applied science, computing,
engineering, and technology) outlined some ideas about how
to integrate teaching these so-called "soft skills"
into engineering curriculums in a report
published last year (128kb, ).
The authors pinpointed Union College
coputer science and engineering professor John Spinelli, who
developed a course that examined the history of electrical
engineering by combining the study of technological development
in American and European civilizations with a concentration
on writing, oral communication, and ethics. They also praised
the University of Utah, which brought in teaching assistants
from the humanities into engineering classes so that communication
skills can be taught as “situational” learning.
The report also emphasized that group
assignments in a classroom setting can help cultivate those
much-needed teamwork skills.
The Office Corner: TeenSpeak should,
like, not be used in the office place
And if young engineers didn’t have
enough problems learning how to communicate, they also have
to shape their vernacular to avoid the dreaded phenomenon
that language experts are calling “TeenSpeak.”
TeenSpeak, (you know- my generation’s
version of the “groovy” lingo that has transcended
into phrases such as “like” or “whatever”)
is apparently showing up in the office space, unnerving some
well-spoken elders and raising questions as to what happened
to English language education.
Besides concerns about lax language
skills, critics
see this adolescent dialect as the young’s culture of
informality. And worse yet, TeenSpeak could be costing some
young people their reputation on the job as the boss man sees
such talk as a lack of etiquette and professional presentation
skills.
Jeff Fenimore, a principal architect
at Architects Rudi/Lee/Dreyer in Iowa, warned students in
the Iowa
State Daily that this slang “may hurt a potential
employee’s credibility.” (Dude. That sucks.)
But for those engineers who really do
need help learning how to transform their thoughts into communicable
ideas, there are many articles and resources available for
developing such skills.
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