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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?

With grad school done for the year (one year down, one more to go), I decided to take the afternoon off on Friday. After working in the morning, I headed down to Evanston to have lunch with Abby. We had been talking earlier in the week and had decided on Blind Faith Café, a vegetarian restaurant, for lunch. Those of you who know me might be surprised, but I thought I would give it a try. The short of it: I liked the ratatouille, and the macrobiotic plate didn’t look bad, either. I think I’ll head back down there again and try some more things from the menu, but don’t count on my giving up meat any time soon.

One bit of news has been known to me for a week now, but I have hesitated to post about it because it has not been finalized. Another bit of news I found out about yesterday. We’ll start with the freshest news: I was accepted into the Northwestern MSIT Program for the Fall of 2008.

The NU MSIT Program is a two-year cohort that is a unique blend (at least in the Chicago area) of business and information technology. The program is also not cheap, at almost $29k for the 2008-2009 academic year. I’ll be looking at student loans to help cover the cost. At the end of the two years, I will have a Master of Science in Information Technology, along with the Northwestern alumni network. I hope that this program will pay off by helping me achieve my career goals, but I won’t know until I go through with it.

The second bit of news, which is actually the first bit that I mentioned above, is that I interviewed for and was offered a job at another school district. If I’ve talked to you about it, then you already know as much as I do. As the details are finalized, I’ll try to remember to follow up this post with more. For now, I’ll leave you with that much information.