KEENzine5

Recently, I’ve made cancer the focus of Georgia Tech’s Quantitative Engineering Physiology Course. The global impact of this disease is clear and the recently launched “Cancer Moonshot” initiative makes it a timely topic. We challenge our students to own their laboratory experiences and engineer strategies to interfere with the physiological processes that lead to cancer. Student teams develop their own comprehensive research proposals, which then become the foundation for experimental validation in the lab and employing relevant techniques. Undergraduate engineering and science curricula invariably incorporate laboratory courses to give students the opportunity to learn techniques as well as reflect on some of the topics that they are exposed to in lectures. Often, these courses require students to carry out laboratory procedures that we as instructors decide are important to learn. These techniques may be valuable if the students use them in their future work. But what if they don’t? A more productive approach is to establish a laboratory learning environment that gives students more control over what they learn – that fosters skills that will be transferable to the workplace, such as problem-finding, problem-solving, critical analysis, and strategizing. This was the motivation for me to transform the cell-based Quantitative Engineering Physiology course from a lab course to a problem-driven research experience. The benefit and challenge of student ownership is divergence. Divergence can lead to unexpected solutions, but it can also tax specific resources such as a faculty member’s time. It is the familiar trade-off between the efficiency of standardization and the generative nature of the extraordinary. I want my students to be able to pursue the extraordinary. For my research course to be an effective medium to train students in entrepreneurial mindset, a conceptual change accompanied by restructuring of the course was warranted. One fundamental transformation was to give students greater autonomy in finding problems, developing methodologies, and executing strategies. With basic information and minimal skills, the students can venture into challenging tasks on their own. This, in fact, is where the transformation happens, allowing students to develop their entrepreneurial mindsets through problem- finding and problem-solving processes that sequentially instill the 3C’s. A key to the success of the course was establishing a very engaging atmosphere from start to finish. We want an inquisitive culture. Here is how I structured the five modules to create student ownership: Modules 1-3: Knowledge-building through weekly lectures, investigating cancer databases, and making journal club presentations. Students are also trained in basic experimental techniques and offered opportunities to reproduce published experiments. Module 4: Identifying a problem for experimentation, preparing a research proposal with background, hypothesis, specific aims, research strategy, expected outcomes, and a timeline. Module 5: Hands-on experimentation related to the project, data analysis, and poster presentation, culminating in a final individual report. The progression of the students through the modules allows them to systematically develop an entrepreneurial mindset. In the early modules, it is critical that the class acquire enough information to identify a problem. As one of the great entrepreneurs of our time, Steve Jobs, said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." The students need to have a thorough understanding of what information is out there in the problem area to help them 32