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One of the things I love about being a grad student at Northwestern McCormick’s MSIT program is that I receive a regular newsletter from the engineering school (although it is apparently available as an RSS feed). In the most recent newsletter was a an article titled Study: Engineering Stereotypes Drive Counterproductive Practices, by Emily Ayshford.

The study was done by Paul Leonardi, the Breed Junior Chair in Design at Northwestern University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and colleagues at the University of Colorado. What they found was that engineering students would fall into stereotypical behavior they have observed in media or in older students, such as procrastination, working individually on a group project, or bragging about having done a problem without following directions. These behaviors are what students feel they need to do to prove their engineering prowess, but hiring managers are finding that they are counterproductive for the real world workplace.

"There’s a stereotype that engineers do things by themselves," Leonardi says. "So when students are asked to work in teams, they think, am I going to be disadvantaged? When I go to the workplace am I not going to be as valuable?"

In other words, students believed that if they weren’t able to do a project alone, they couldn’t consider themselves an expert engineer. Leonardi and his colleagues often saw groups splitting up group work, even if they were specifically asked to work on it together at the same time.

These findings fascinate me. At least since high school, I have been guilty of such behavior. In grad school, however, I have taken a slightly different approach. I’m still a bit of a procrastinator, but that has little to do with bragging and more to do with some occasionally poor time management. I like to do some of the coursework alone, but the huge amount of group work has been extremely beneficial to me. The chance to interact with others about the topics we’re learning in class has been invaluable, both from a personal learning experience perspective and from a professional networking perspective.

I have definitely found it is important to learn how to work well on a team, and even better to learn how to work well on a team where everyone has different strengths, weaknesses, and personalities. The guy who prefers to work alone or do everything himself only serves to bring the entire team down.

Are there any other stereotypical behaviors you’ve seen in school or in the workplace? Were they in engineering or in another field?

This past weekend, Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago), a pastor at Salem Baptist Church on Chicago’s South Side, brought more attention school funding in Illinois. Meeks’ has called on Chicago parents to boycott the Chicago Public Schools, keeping children out of school until the funding issues are resolved. To make things worse, nearly 50 other Chicago ministers yesterday announced their support for Meeks’ boycott.

The Florida Senate recently passed SB 2692 with a vote of 21-17. One Democrat voted for the bill, while five Republicans voted against it. SB 2692 is yet another proposed piece of legislation favoring teaching creationism and intelligent design as science (what I will call CIDS). A similar bill is in the Florida House, but a bill must pass both the House and Senate with identical language before it can go before Gov. Charlie Crist (I’m hoping it’s pronounced with a short ‘i’ and not a long ‘i’).

I’m not going to pretend that I understand Florida, because I don’t. However, I also would not have pegged the home of NASA as being a state in support of CIDS. I can only hope that the bills do not pass the Florida legislature. I could not agree more with Florida’s Senate Democratic Leader when he says, "In 2008, it is embarrassing for us to be debating evolution." When will this idiocy stop?

Yesterday I attended the Network World ITRoadmap Conference & Expo in Rosemont. At the expo, I sat in on the Web 2.0 in the Enterprise session, where Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research and Alex Petrov of Whirlpool Canada talked about Web 2.0. I’m going to be blunt here: Lazar’s presentation was almost worthless if you had already been following Web 2.0 in any way over the past year. All he talked about for 90 minutes was Web 2.0 itself, only dipping his toe into Web 2.0’s actual use in the enterprise. There is more content in the first sentence of each section of the Wikipedia entry for Web 2.0 than in Lazar’s entire presentation! No joke.