The Exchanges

Q Let's dive more into STEM at UHCX. First, what does it look like to build a STEM program from the ground up? Where do you start?

A That's the most daunting thing about my assignment here so So far as to build from the ground up. So the first place you start is you surround yourself by great people. I have advisors across the spectrum of math and sciences who have helped me think about what does great STEM look like today. So great advisors is the first step. Um, the second is just, uh, taking advantage of the fact that when you're starting over, you don't have to hold on to stuff that is long overdue to be, uh, expired. And so thinking innovatively, thinking about how to, um, Take advantage of new starts has been a big part of developing the curriculum. And then, um, uh, one thing that we're going to do that not everybody's doing is, um, I have some colleagues that use the phrase, let's teach STEM assuming that computers exist. That kind of sounds silly. Uh, and, and I don't just mean computer programming. What I mean is that, um, so humans are amazing beings. They have innate dignity, and I think humans are really special, but as computers, they're third rate. And, and so a stem should spend less time, um, Having folks do the tedium of computation and more time on modeling problems, interpreting solutions, valid, validating sensitivity analysis. So we're going to redistribute where the focus is so that students are employing computers where they ought to be doing the work and doing more of the hard human …

AI assessment note: “the first place you start is you surround yourself by great people”

Q in your class, like, like some kid around me, both in high school and college, would know. I remember we asked a bunch of our friends who run engineering teams, like, what skills do they wish people would know coming out of, out of school? What have you found? Because it seems like, it seems like a lot of these things are not being taught that are actually practical skills.

A Yeah, I think, um, there are a few things. One is teamwork. Like, the fact that you would ask your friend to do it for you, your professor probably hated that, but that actually, It's a big part of working as a team. Recognizing my expertise has ended. Uh, how do I reach out to somebody that can help me? So that's actually, I would call that a skill rather than as a kind of a crutch. Um, and then, um, to relevance, having students working on problems that are clearly relevant when they're working on it. I think that, um, employers are saying the, these students don't know how to do very well what they were taught and nothing they were taught is that relevant to what I want them to do. So This gets back to that industry feedback loop. We're going to have our curriculum informed with the problems that industry, uh, knows are important. So our students start, uh, sharpening their teeth on those problems while they're learning how to solve problems.

AI assessment note: “One is teamwork... Recognizing my expertise has ended.”

Q right now is currently accepting its inaugural class of a hundred students. I think we're just crossing, uh, more than half of the class is already totally locked in, and the applications are still open for some people. Some people are still deciding, uh, you know, if there are students or parents watching this who might be interested in STEM at UATX, Why should they choose UATX? What's your pitch?

A Yeah, so, uh, my pitch is, uh, your students are gonna get some of the best teachers in the country, um, who are gonna care about your students, and they're gonna be present. Um, you can send your kid to whatever you think the top tier school is, they're gonna see their instructor of record, almost never. They're gonna have a TA that they may or may not understand, and they're gonna be depressed. Um, they're gonna come to UATX, and they're gonna be engaged with professors who care about them as people, and care about developing them as students. And, um, and as learners. And then we're gonna have great curriculum. Curriculum that's going to be world-class because it's informed by, uh, the hardest problems that are out there today.

AI assessment note: “my pitch is, uh, your students are gonna get some of the best teachers”

Q Oh yes, you will. And in recent, in recent years, uh, you know, we've seen obviously Identity politics, wokeness, even into the sciences. That's something that a lot of us thought wouldn't happen. How do you guard against that? And, and how do you cultivate authentic curiosity and openness among students without going into those areas?

A Yeah, it is surprising to me. I, I'm, I'm surprised. I was looking at a paper recently in what would be considered a quality journal in, in, uh, in an area of biology, and at the end of the article, they had these identity statements where the authors listed these features about themselves, which, quite frankly, are completely irrelevant to the, to the study. And, um, there's this, uh, there are these, um, Martonian norms in science that goes all the way back to the forties, and one of them is called universalism, which I will paraphrase as Scientific validity gives not a rip about your personal preferences. And that, that, that, six years ago, nobody would have argued with that. Today, that's, that's coming under fire. So here's, here's how you get at that. One is that you repeat that mantra. Over and over again. You model that in the work that you do. You model it in the teaching. And then you just keep telling students, you know, reality is going to win. Reality wins. And as you continue to demonstrate reality winning in STEM, I think students will start to believe it.

AI assessment note: “One is that you repeat that mantra. Over and over again. You model that”

Q One of the things you said is the courses will emphasize computation-enabled thinking. What does that mean?

A Yeah, so we're, um, we're working with some, uh, world-class partners, uh, and, um, we're gonna, we're gonna field some curricular programs that are different than what anybody else is doing. This gets back to something I spoke about a little before. If you think about a quantitative problem, any sort, any field, generally they're, I'll break it down into three phases. One is, you actually have to take what the problem is, and you have to abstract it in some way so that you can formulate it in mathematical language, right? You can't attack a problem until you've done the formulation, but You need, generally humans are, that's, that's one place you'd like humans to emphasize. Then there's this middle bit. Most technical classes now, they prepackage the problem for you, and they say, here's an equation, solve for x, or, you know, and, and you spend all of this time being a third-rate computer.

AI assessment note: “take what the problem is, and you have to abstract it in some way”

Q Yep. That's cool. Let's go to 21st century STEM here. You're now the Dean of UATX's Center for STEM. Before we get into UATX specifically, let's talk about designing a STEM curriculum for the 21st century. Why does it require a new approach to do STEM now? Aren't there lots of things that are the same as they've always been? What's missing in universities today?

A Yeah, it's a, it's a really good question, and, uh, and there's some great things going on in universities now, but, uh, there are some things that we want to reclaim. Uh, our, our provost often talks about the Roman god Janus, who has a face pointing backwards, and he has a face pointing forward, and so, uh, we want to, we want to develop students who think about STEM built upon a study of kind of the great human questions. Like, the reason that you study STEM at all is because you have some Aughts that you'd like to approach or some, some great human question. So, uh, that's a, that's a foundation that, uh, some STEM programs will just omit and they'll kind of race straight to the STEM. Uh, but, um.

AI assessment note: “we want to develop students who think about STEM built upon a study of kind of the great human questions.”