CPACE Meeting Minutes
Date: January 18, Time: 3:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. Location: MichiganState University,East LansingMI Next meeting: January 30, 2008 Time: 3:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. Participants listed by group:
General Agenda: (attachment 1) 1. Review minutes from Dec 19, 2007 meeting. There were no changes to the minutes. 2. Finalize the advisory board discussion.
Mark: The primary agenda item is to move the Advisory Board (AB) discussion along in terms of potential candidates and how to start the process. Jon: Need to have a space to upload stuff on the wiki. Mark : Any suggestion on the board membership role and the letter from Tom? (We did minor edits). Mark: Review the list of employers. Need to target some initial meeting time and think about what we want to do at that meeting. Cindee: Look at the document from Dec 19 (on the wiki). Jeannine: I recommend that Tammy takes a look at the associations sites to look at what kind of data do they have. (Daina to send a list of websites to Tammy). Neeraj: Under associations it says Fishback Thompson and Huber and that's a consulting firm so it should be under business. Also MDOT we could go to the deputy director might be more helpful and would have a better picture of MDOT. Lisa: If you have a recommendation there I would take your contact before mine. Neeraj: A person there could be Larry Tibbits he has a rank close to the director's office and if he is too busy he might appoint someone. Mark : Should we have a pass at this list and see if we can narrow down a list of contacts? Daina: I have a general question. I tried contacting a couple people several personally others by bulk e-mail and I did not get a response. I am thinking about using up favors is this a better place to do it or better to do it when we are doing the surveys and gathering the information? Where would a particular person be a better value, AB or surveys? Tom: Depends on the person if they are high up and you want them in an advisory capacity I would say use them now and then when you have them hooked use them to find people under them. Daina: Because I am thinking where would this person be of greater value to what we are trying to accomplish. Cindee: The AB is to help us with access to more contacts. Daina: Because people are not jumping at the chance or it might be that I am not asking right or maybe I need to be more pushy. Mark: Without asking names what kind of people are we talking about? Daina: Our AB (ChE) no one responded after two requests and that was an e-mail. There are 12 or 13 members and I don't know if I should call them. There's a fellow at Dow, Mike McDonald he used to be chair of the college of eng advisory board and he is a good friend so he might do this because I ask him to. Then there is the ASEE president elect and I don't know if she ever got back to you or not. Mark: No. Jon: I have a question too about choosing the people I have two people from the advisory board in computer science who are not signed up but are possible and I don't know which one to go after so I need advice, I think I should do only one. One of them is a computer science person at Chrysler the other one is an IBM person stationed in Midland so it has a lot of overlap into Dow. Which one is better? Tom: Both of them are fairly high so what does the IBM person do? Jon: Advisory Board. Daina: I think we have good contacts with automotive. Right? Jeannine: Yes Jon: So maybe I would go after the Dow or the Dow connected person. Lisa: I think we want to target GM just because GM employs so many MSU graduates we might want to diversify so the IBM ... Jon: OK I will go that direction. Mark: So the person that you are thinking about who is in the CSE advisory board you are thinking as a candidate for our advisory board and similarly Daina you are talking about people for our advisory board. Daina: Yes and I understand know that even if they could have valuable input in the surveying itself because of their position, there is nothing keeping our advisory board members from being part of the survey. In other words they are not a wasted resource in terms of survey. Mark: Our primary goal for the AB is that they would give us an entry to the company and advise; we hope they are interested enough in the project that they would offer to have their company or association participate in the surveys. Jeannine: I am listening to Clint's question and I am going to suggest talking about the target of the project. Clint: I am confused because I am new to the project. First, who are we trying to impact in the end? Tom: Students taking computing courses. Clint: Where do you see them in their job positions? Mark: These are engineers, entry level working engineers. Clint: Does MSU feel that the students that they are producing do not have adequate computer skills leaving this university? Tom: No. This project aside, we need to have processes to make sure that our graduates meet the needs of our stakeholders. In developing this grant in a pedagogical research mode in industry if you go to the job fair for example they what something very specific, from the curricular point of view somewhere we should be able to take those very specific needs listed by employers and translate them or abstract them into more broad learning to learn types of skills. Jon: We are at a stage now where CSW is doing the heavy lifting to go out and identify the industry people that should advise on what they want. Then the academics need to translate this into something that is about curricular change (next project) changing our programs to meet those needs after we get the common language with the industry people. Mark: Went through the model (project summary) Clint: Having been involved in similar targeted curricular activities often we found that the upper management people (as I see in the list here) are not the people who do the work. Jon: We went there and we decided that we need to have a mix we get the manager type or even above the manager type so that we can populate with people to interview because then manager s can request it, but I agree with you and in addition the advisory board needs to have a sprinkling of people that are more line people that are out there doing the stuff. Clint: Those are the people I assume we are targeting to train and those people who are currently in those positions and the jobs that they are actually doing. I have students and I ask what are your skills, what is it that you have to bring to the table. Jeannine: Originally when we framed this work we were thinking about economic challenges in the state of mi based on work that CSW is doing in mid-MI we were imagining that we could create a community around what was going on in this region and what's going on in the colleges and univ from the eng perspective in particular computational knowledge and skill building perspective that would be common between the two spheres. But when we observed where the MSU students are going we realized that a lot of them were going out of MI and we decided to broaden our scope from the geographic perspective. The other challenge was to decide how many disciplines (we decided five or six) then you have the issues of the range of industries and businesses that you need to connect to get sampling from these range of disciplines. This in turn affects the decision of who do we target for the AB because we need a much broader sample. Mark: At the advisory board level we are looking for members that have contacts and know people that can get contacts into those areas. The AB would help us get the contacts in the company and help us get in and talk to the people both at the managerial level and also to the people that are working in the eng disciplines. The initial task of the AB is to help us think about the questions to ask and provide us contacts into those areas. Jon: We raised this issue before but I want to bring it again. Do we need one AB or back to back ones? Because the function that we are focused on now is for the AB getting us the interview but we need AB later when we're sifting through this stuff to tell us that we understand. There are two functions to the AB that play in different times as we go along and the question is do we have one AB or do we constitute another later on? Clint: I am thinking of a particular person. She works with industries in extracting from them what are the critical skills that they need for people to do in order to be successful in their business. Then she helps those who are doing the curriculum and the training and the schools developing the curriculum do analyses of what they currently have and what their needs are for their curriculum. She is at Fairstate her name is Kitty M. Mark: She could be a good AB member those are then kind of folks that we need in the AB. Back to Jon's point whether we go to one or two I don't consider the AB to only provide us an entry for the surveys and then they are done, we have to keep feeding back on this, we then digest this and keep checking with the AB; we need people that have the big picture. Jon: Big picture yes, but we need to know what's going on too and we are not necessarily going to find both attributes in the same people. Jeannine: Part of what we are trying to learn or do is to implement a process for doing this work and the eng programs here have an AB and they have a process on curriculum design. We are also looking to have a streamlined coherent process and approach and she (Kitty) could help on that. Mark: In terms of the number of the AB twelve seems to be the number of people that keeps coming up. We are expanding this across the five or six disciplines and not everybody is available all the time. Neeraj: I understand that not all industries can be represented but the level of computing skills vary by discipline so we need to keep this in mind because what a GM needs may not what Fishback Thompson needs. Tom: You want to group them discipline wise, at the top I would see CS, Comp E, EE; in the middle ME, EE depending on the industry and at a less rigorous level CE, BioE, material sciences, ChE. Here is the disconnect again in their education ChE do a lot of modeling more so than civil but in practice, on the job more chemical eng would show up as general management in general. Mark: One of the goals of what we are trying to do here is to understand these alignments. Daina: Because as faculty we look at it fairly narrow. Tom: So you want industries or segments of people that are doing modeling and segments where there are people going into project or product management. Daina: Having a representative on the AB that comes from a company that has all these various aspects of job descriptions that would be a very good person that would be knowledgeable about different areas. Mark: Is that like a Dow or a Shell? Daina: That's a Dow that's a Shell, but it is not a small company. Mark: Remember we did have the conversation about wanting to not load the AB with people from just big companies because then we have the little eng firms that employ a set of people that do a wide range of things as opposed to the very specialized stuff that you would have in the big companies. We are not going to be able to get everyone. Clint: What do mean by modeling? Tom: WE are talking about taking tools such as mathlab or visual basic or something like that and using them to build mathematical models based on equations that can model chemical transport or circuits. Daina: It could be mathematical descriptions of biochemical processes; it could also be things like using simulators. Clint: You are talking about computational models. When I think of modeling a lot of the companies that I work with they work with modeling from the stand point of designing products using FAI analysis, that's part of a CAT design so we are looking at using unigraphics or (gap) but a lot of people would do a CAT drawing and from that do a CAT type analysis. Tom: I don't think we are concerning ourselves with CAT type of stuff because the reality of CAT in our curriculum is we are going to use unigraphics because they gave us 55 million dollars and we are going to expect students to use that throughout t their curriculum and learn it enough to put together their projects and do their modeling. Jeannine: I guess Clint your questions are raising for me trying to remind myself the focus in terms of MSU and LCC. Mark: Not only of LCC in terms of a feeder to MSU but in terms of LCC curriculum. Clint: When I talk to the industries I work with when they say modeling they are talking CAT modeling they are talking about how to bring a product to the market, so there's going to be CAT models of all these products we bring to the table and often the people who design these products are not ME they are people who have practical skills. Daina: eng have practical skills too, but I know what you are saying they are the expert users. Clint: That's why I keep asking these questions, who are you focusing on targeting? Mark: To the degree that we are focusing on the initial phase of this project the objective was to interview employers after we constitute the AB and then we have these interviews with the employers and the people who are working; so if we pick a Dow chemical they will probably have all the range from the expert mathematical model to the very practical level that you are talking about. They are going to articulate those, there's going to be overlap, different areas of emphasis; we would want to come back and understand. Some of those are going to look for associate degree from LCC and a bachelor from MSU as a potential employee. When we get our entry into the company we are going get information from both of those. Jon: When we say modeling without any qualifier we are talking about a computational simulation model. Jeannine: The grant from NSF is for undergraduate computational education. Mark: All computing integrated across eng and integrates the community college and four year institutional level. The original call was undergraduate computing education we send ours in a very specific way. Tom: The proposal uses the term revitalization of undergraduate computing education. Jon: Our cut on it was eng disciplines non computer sciences. Mark: We are not taking about anything that directly impacts the computer sciences curriculum. Jon: Except as taken by the people in the other disciplines. Jeanine: Trying to hold the link to Mid MI and the economy here which is an important connection to LCC in terms of the relationships that your students have with your programs and the opportunities that they have in this region. Clint: Your focus is in computational and a whole series of companies that I work with dropped of it. Jon: They are not using any computational at all. Only solid modeling? Clint: They don't need the computational stuff they do it all inside the solid model, they are users of the systems but they are not generators of the code. They are creating a model and putting constrains on that model. Jon: And saying how much stress something can take. That is still a model. Tom: Yes. You can use unigraphics or add-ins to unigraphics to do stress analysis, and will design parts of all sorts of things. Mark: Let me pull this back a little bit here. This is part of the point of what we are trying to do here rather than us trying to figure this out here, now we are going to collect the data and sort it out and see where it all fits. One of our goals is to find these skills and what people see their needs going because there is a lag time between doing curricular revisions and where they fit into the job market. Tom: We need to talk to some of those people to learn what you (Clint) already know. Clint: A good example would be Symmetry medical they have associate degree people designing hip implants that would eventually end up in your body and they are doing analyses, they will get something from Johnson& Johnson and they take the model and start looking at it. Tom: If these are associate degrees where is the first eng up the line from them? Clint: Probably at J&J. J&J would tell them what they want and they probably would have done some initial eng because they know how much weight you can put on that hip and the folks at Symmetry would twick with that, but J&J is doing the initial eng. Tom: Is the owner or the manager a four year degree eng. Clint: Possibly. Mark: We were framing this in the proposal; we did not want to think of it only as computing but as computational problem solving in eng. Jon: This is the right twist. Mark: It is an interesting thing because one of the things that we anticipate is this is a fast growing business, these tools change they push down so you get people doing things that they would not have been able to do before with that level of education given the tools that were there and given what we see as a trajectory of tools and changes in the job market that's what we are trying to do figure out how do we align that so that we are not constantly teaching something that is not relevant. Tom: As soon as the associate's degree people are calculating stresses and designing and changing thicknesses to reduce stresses that may be being done by associate's degree people but it is also being done by eng so therefore is relevant to the curriculum. Clint: I want to make sure that we are using a common language based in the environment that you are in. Tom: Stresses are computational in this sense. Clint: When you say modeling I think of modeling from within the environment which I come from. When you talk to these companies and you say modeling they think unigraphics. Mark: That's the point we are trying to get at; all the various stakeholders that are coming to the table in this process come from worlds that do not intersect a whole lot, the intersection is we prepare students we send them out and they go and work for these companies the terminology is often off and part of the process is to try and figure out a way to expedite the translation and the communication. Tom: Another way to look at it whether they use unigraphics or any other tool, we are trying to educate those students before they are using all those tools to some level of our understanding about computing which is embedded in this and matches our curriculum. What do we need to add to our curriculum in addition to giving them black boxes and say put stuff in here it will model transportation or something else. Jon: For example one of the hardest lessons to teach our students is that you don't just believe what comes out. Jon: With both the folks from Western here, we need to know what you all need to have available what should we be doing to facilitate your part of the process. Mark J: Once you have selected this committee and they've done some of their work. Part of what you are trying to do is develop a model a system to be able to do this kind of thing and transfer into other parts of the state or the country so at this point you are in an organizational stage. It looks to that you are following the proposal very closely. And the Wiki is a good way to do this because it tends to keep a much cleaner set of records. Jon: Do we have an IRB issue with the people you (CSW) interviewed. Lisa: We did not have to go through IRB because the funding was coming directly to us but this is different because the funding is coming through MSU. Mark: I talked to the IRB people we have a preliminary approval so we can't collect data without IRB approval so as an example this meetings all these records this is data and is going to be used at various stages in the process and their position is that this level of data they did not care about. When we get ready to go out and start getting surveys and interviews will have to get IRB approval. We need to go to them and say here is the process and these are the instruments. Jeannine: In terms of the process for these data collection we want to make sure that we leverage whatever you are doing in relationship to what you already have and the same thing applies to LCC we don't want to replicate what you are doing. In terms of the AB we are talking about a group of people who can advise on the overall project who would be connected through the duration of the project. There is a group of people that we need to engage because they would either be part of the data collection process or connecting us to the organizations, the people who would be in the data collection process I don't know what the appropriate relationship between the AB and that intermediately group of people that are the connectors. Mark: The AB can provide us some more names, for example we have some people on this list that not necessarily need t be an AB member but we could go and ask questions. I think that on the AB we want people who can get the scope of a range of things and then as we move the process along and start to iterate and refine and look at our abstracted concepts they can easily move and say this is meaningful and I have something to offer here too. Lisa: I don't think we when we are talking about some associations and how to work with them to access their data gathering there are some association people that are very knowledgeable about what we are talking about and I feel confident that they will have technical expertise that will help us in our process all along the way, we might have to do some shuffling at some point but we also want to have people to follow all the way through. Mark: Someone from an association at this stage on the project who was useful to connect us to the work force people and as we move to the next stage they might say this is not my area of expertise but a college in the association has that. Pete: I think people at this stage should go and physically meet with the candidates in person. Mark: Yes, and this relates to what Daina was saying you can't just e-mail or send them a letter you might want a have to say you are a very important person and we want you. Daina: The personal meeting idea is good. Cindee: During the initial outreach and communication it is important that there is a person there to be able to explain further and give more detailed information if necessary. Mark: Yes, and in the letter there was a discussion of me being the person to follow up which I am happy to do but I think we also need to have the appropriate person who did the contact doing the follow up. I am happy to handle all of the dealings and mechanics but that initial contact "are you interested?" and the "you are very important to us" part needs to be followed up by the person doing the outreach. Daina: It really depends on the point to which the individual initial contact brings them. If they say yes I am interested I want more information. Mark: Yes and I am happy to do that but we don't want to blow the chances we might have with a particular candidate by "Who is this guy?" Tom: Daina when you said that you sent e-mails to the members of the advisory board where they specific about participating in this AB? Daina: Yes Tom: Seems to me that what we ought to do is use 7 plus or minus 2 active people try to identify starting now about 7 people that represent some combination of either undergraduate major-related, sector-related, auto sector chemical sector or computational view point related to try and start picking. Jeannine: I don't think that this list includes many of the people that you from MSU are connected to. Mark: That list you generated from your work force. Tom: Neeraj did propose someone from medium size civil eng firms such as Fishback-Thompson as he mentioned, they would represent a class of less rigorous computational model, people that are using general computing skills and designing and managing projects. Daina might identify Mike McDonald or another similar type of person at a Dow or Shell. Mark: We've identified a couple of chemical, but mechanical we were talking about somebody from CSE who is IBM or Chrysler but there have been conversations about the auto industry. CSW you got the auto industry pretty well covered on the mechanical side? Tom: It was mention that you're well connected to the auto-industry but we haven't heard a specific suggestion for the AB names. Lisa: I want to see GM on the list and I want to see manufacturing eng, as per GM I don't know who you guys have contacted but your contact is probably going to be better than mine, mine is through a different way and perhaps we won't reach the appropriate eng division through my contact. GM seems appropriate because of the amount of businesses they do. I have good contacts there and they can help us cover a lot of different fields depending on what we think our need is and as far as auto goes there are a lot of people to choose from. Tom: Let's explore the society of manufacturing eng as opposed to the society of automotive eng. I am not nearly as closely connected to the society of manufacturing eng. MSU as well as Kettering threw out manufacturing eng as a separate degree program in the last six or seven years and we see mechanical eng and automotive eng working in that sector. I don't know to what extent manufacturing engs are running manufacturing plants or designing the facilities to make manufacturing plants work but it's fair to say that manufacturing of automotives seems to be going outside the USA much more that automotive design which will remain in MI, Germany and Tokyo regardless of where the manufacturing is so why should we decide manufacturing eng vs. the auto sector. Lisa: I like SME because I know how active they been in their training and curriculum development and certification and in terms of their size I think they might be able to bring some diversity in the different fields of eng that we are looking at, but you are right SAE could do that I am just not as familiar whit them in terms of academic development. Tom: Since you are familiar with them let me just express my concerns and you can say no that's' not a problem. I would not want to see SME use this to say that we should go back to make manufacturing eng a separate degree because that's not going to happen, given the experience of both MSU and Kettering you are not going to get universities to launch manufacturing eng as a separate major from mechanical or electrical. Lisa: They really push things like hands on applied academic at the K-12 level. They deal a lot with career ...all tied to eng so I don't think they would be as parochial as you are concerned but at the same time we don't have to absolutely go with SME, I think is very worthwhile to go with SAE, my interest is because I worked with them before and had a good experience and I think this is up their ally but we can consider another option. Cindee: In terms of being balanced and not being to tilt to automotive or manufacturing, there are different kinds of manufacturing and that when we start to get into the different types of manufacturing businesses. Mark: So you think that SME is broader than SAE. Cindee: Yes. So we can include them but we need to keep a balance. As we are trying to be deliberate in terms of being representative of the disciplinary we want to be sure we are not to slanted to the automotive area given the challenges that we are having with the economy and the things that are trying to take place in terms of the different sub-industries. Tom: We will continue to place people in the manufacturing but we deemphasize manufacturing in our recruiting material. Manufacturing attracts people in two year institutions but not in four year eng. Daina: Are we intentionally avoiding having academics beside us on the AB? Mark: If we get an academic is certainly someone outside our institution. Jon: I have a procedural question about how we go not selecting but getting the people for the AB. On the one hand we have been putting some names on the list and now we have some more names that each of us is thinking of but I am really reticent to go ask the person that you target to be on it unless that is the person that you want. Mark: I don't think we want to start contacting until we have all decided. Jon: I agree so that sends us back further and we got a get this done. Tom: We are trying to get six or seven names. Daina: So you want names first. I thought we were supposed to be contacting these people. Jon: I thought that to begin with too but then the further we.. Mark: My understanding was that here is the list of possible names and we need to go with. Jon: Daina is right a couple of meetings ago we were tasked to actually go ask people if they were interested to serve. Tom: But we did not have any bites, so we are OK We need to be very targeted. Clint: If you want people to show up and help you got to show them what's in it for them. You got to tell them what it worth is to give us their time. Our AB is 50 people we give them food, we give them companies, we have hands on demonstrations etc. Tom: The opportunity here is to be part of a major NSF project. Mark: Also to have input in re-shaping the work force they have the opportunity to look out for their work force. Jeannine: What Clint is describing and is very interesting is a network of these businesses that are benefiting each other by participating in the network but also benefiting by what you are doing through LCC it is a different concept than AB. Clint: We constantly find collaborations among these companies. Mark: We need to define a schedule for the next round of meetings. Quarterly meetings were one of the ideas. Summary and key points Review invitation pack.
Review updated list of employers.
The grant from NSF is to revitalize undergraduate
computational education. All computing integrated across eng and
integrating community colleges and four year institutions. The
various stakeholders that are coming to the table in this process come
from worlds that do not intersect a whole lot, the intersection is we
prepare students we send them out and they go and work for
these companies the terminology is often off and part of the process is
to try and figure out a way to expedite the translation and the
communication.
In terms of balance between automotive and manufacturing,
there are different kinds of manufacturing represented by different
types of manufacturing businesses. In that sense SME is
broader than SAE. As we are trying to be deliberate in terms of
representing the different disciplines we want to be sure not to over
represent the automotive. In terms of the economy automotive
is a challenging area and manufacturing also represents efforts in
mid-MI in terms of different sub-industries.
CSW: - Tammy to look at the associations web sites to look at the labor market occupational data and how it compares to the federally generated data. This issue was raised by Jeannine at the Dec 19, 2007 meeting. Daina (MSU) will send Tammy the relevant websites. MSU/LCC: - For the next meeting bring a list of five potential candidates for the advisory board from each of the sectors business, academia, and professional associations. Logistics: Spring 2008 meetings schedule: The time for the meetings is 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Wednesday, January 30, 2008 Wednesday, February 13, 2008 Wednesday, February 27, 2008 Wednesday, March 12, 2008 Wednesday, March 26, 2008 Wednesday, April 09, 2008 Wednesday, April 23, 2008 Location: MichiganState University, East Lansing MI |
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