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Creating and Sustaining a Departmental Culture: Ideas for Undergraduate Programs

Abstract

Each engineering department has a unique departmental culture based on its history, faculty makeup, geography, and a myriad of other factors. While some departments have a long history with a well-established culture and traditions, other departments that have been recently formed are faced with the challenge of creating a culture from scratch. The success of a department in creating and sustaining a desirable culture can have a significant impact on recruiting, retention, and general satisfaction of its undergraduate students. This paper reviews the engineering literature and describes different models and activities which departments have successfully used in this area, including freshman courses, professional societies, departmental traditions, professional development courses, and intentional interactions between faculty and students. These types of activities also serve to shape students’ expectations about what it means to enter the engineering profession and help new student identify themselves as engineers.

Introduction

The Obama Administration recently announced new freedom of information approaches in their Open Government Directive which has, as one of its themes, to “create and institutionalize a culture of open government.”1 College campuses across the country talk (and act) to “create a culture of sustainability”2, as evidenced by eco-based residential villages. W.L. Gore CEO Terri Kelly speaks of creating a culture of “innovation” by “[creating] the right environment where collaboration happens naturally.”3 While it is clear the phrase “creating a culture” is fairly ubiquitous in modern society across various platforms, a standard connotation of this phrase is much less so. Accordingly, we define the term culture in this work to mean “the relationships, interactions, activities, and events involving the department, its faculty, and its undergraduate students.”

As it relates to academia, culture within a department is experienced by the two major stakeholders: students and faculty. Both groups will engage this culture in different ways if exposed to the same event owing to the differences in interactions with the culture. Indeed, even the perspectives of the stakeholders for a specific interaction from a particular group will be different. Accordingly, one can define four main categories to explore this effect:

1. Student Perspective: Student interacting with the departmental culture 2. Student Perspective: Faculty interacting with the departmental culture 3. Faculty Perspective: Student interacting with the departmental culture 4. Faculty Perspective: Faculty interacting with the departmental culture

Note that separating the student and faculty perspective for the same interaction might lead to very different results. Such an approach was realized recently in a work by Budny et al.4 on student designed surveys. In that study, those researchers asked

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Bullard, L., & Visco, D., & Silverstein, D., & Keith, J. (2010, June), Strategies For Creating And Sustaining A Departmental Culture Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--15767