Another ASEE Annual Conference and Exhibition is in the books! The RIME Collaborative and OSU Engineering Education overall had a large presence in Tampa, Florida. Several of our RIME members had papers presented at the conference, and they all went very well. We are getting lots of practice presenting to new audiences and responding to new questions on the spot. In addition, most of the graduate students in Engineering Education at OSU attended the Student Division social dinner for the first time, which was a good time all around!
Personally, I had just one paper which was presented on Sunday. The idea for the paper came from one of the Undergraduate Teaching Assistants in the Fundamentals of Engineering for Honors (FEH) program, and I helped to mentor him in the development, writing, and presenting of the paper in the Computers in Education Division. He did an excellent job presenting and handled the questions like a pro!
After that finished on Sunday, I was free to attend whatever I wanted for the rest of the conference. I attended seven technical sessions, two division socials, one division business meeting, and a bunch of events in the Exhibit Hall, which is way more than I was able to do last year! I learned a lot from the technical sessions, and in particular, I got to see two other systematic literature reviews presented. One of them was very well done, cited the right foundational literature, and gave me some new ideas about the process. Let’s just say the other one was more of a starting attempt and had lots of room to grow and improve. It was interesting to compare both of them to each other and to the work I am currently doing on my systematic literature review of teaching assistant literature.
One thing I made sure to do in between all of the other events is to reconnect with someone I met last year after my Mathematics Division presentation. He and I shared a lot of the same interests in terms of mathematics engineering education and first-year students. Although my research work has focused more on first-year engineering and teaching assistants than on mathematics in the past year, it was great to catch up with him and see how far we had each gone in a year. I am sure that there will be more good conversations and mutual benefits in the future!
Lastly, I spent a lot of time with the First-Year Programs Division (FPD), since I teach in a first-year engineering program and expect a lot of my dissertation work on teaching assistants to be informed by people and programs involved with this division. I also attended my first ASEE division business meeting for FPD, and it was really interesting to see partly how the division runs from the backside. I even got to vote for the new FPD board members! Although I had already met several people in this division in past years through various events, I got to know even more from other schools in the technical sessions and at the FPD social dinner. In particular, I got to talk with a faculty member and two teaching assistants from NYU Tandon School of Engineering and found out that their teaching assistant structure is very similar to ours at OSU!
Overall, I think we all had a nice time and learned a lot to help propel us through towards next year’s ASEE conference!