The Materials Scientist in 2030, Who is She?

Whenever I ask one of my Physics Department colleagues what it means to be a Physicist, while she might not be able to give me a straightforward answer, she usually has a very clear picture in her head of who she is professionally and why. Likewise, Chemists and Biologists, or Mechanical and Civil Engineers, rarely have issues with their sense of identity. We Materials Scientists, on the other hand, repeatedly ask ourselves the question “What is Materials Science?”. Are we even a science at all, when many Materials Science Departments actually sit in Engineering Faculties? (At my former institution, UC Santa Barbara, we carefully called ourselves the “Materials Department” to side-step this issue).

To an outsider this existential angst might seem like so much professional naval gazing, especially when Time Magazine declared Materials Science the lowest stress profession.  But to an educator, charged with shaping the next generation of professional Materials Scientists it acquires a fundamental importance. What skills should a graduate of a leading Materials Science program take with them into the world. What do they need to be able to do and what should they know.

This blog documents our efforts in the Department of Materials Science at ETH Zürich to find the answer to this eternal question and to implement a new curriculum based on what we discover. Maybe we will never find the answer. But we’re convinced that our search for it will generate creative new ideas that will enhance student learning. And help our students develop into professional Materials Scientists with the best possible skill set for launching their careers in today’s rapidly evolving work environment. I hope that you will enjoy reading about our process and that both our mis-steps (hopefully not too large or too many) and successes (hopefully resounding and numerous) will help you in your own insititutions.

DISCLAIMER: The content of this blog is entirely my blatant one-sided view and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of ETH or any of my colleagues. Since I obviously can’t say that any resemblance to real people is accidental, instead I will try to be nice and hope that no-one sues me. All (preferably constructive) feedback gratefully and enthusiastically received.

So what did we do so far? Well, we agreed that while our curriculum is fabulous (of course) it is time for a shake-up before we start to feel out of date. We decided that we will plan ahead and try to identify the skill-set that our graduates will need in 2030, and that we will aim for Autumn 2020 as the start-date for our new program. I proposed “BS2020” for our project title but my colleagues vetoed it. Darn. But I have to agree that our final choice “The Materials Scientist in 2030, who is she?” is a bit more stylish. Oh, and we had a friend with design skills help us make this snazzy logo:

Our first concrete step has been a day-long retreat to walk through our current curriculum, in which we presented the learning goals of our classes to each other in the chronological order that we impose them on our students. We had two goals for the day: First to make sure that we all know what our students learn and when, and second to identify redundancies so as to make space for introducing new things. We succeeded with the first task, and I think we all found it very useful, even though it took a bit of a long time; our students really learn a lot of stuff! But it’s safe to say that we failed resoundingly with the second objective, in spite of what I thought was a rather cunning approach: Since I was sure no-one would willingly give up any of their own content, we made worksheets for each class so that the colleagues could suggest omissions from classes that were not their own. Kind of like those reality (?) TV shows in which the least popular people get voted off islands. I’m not sure if the colleagues didn’t get the concept or are just too nice, but we all loved everyone’s existing content and had helpful ideas for possible additions. But we didn’t find anything that wasn’t terribly important, nothing that we could let go. Hmmmm.

On the bright side, I guess we all ended the day feeling that our colleagues highly appreciate our teaching and maybe we now even like each other a bit more. Not a bad starting point from which to embark on the intensely collaborative project of a major curriculum revision.

So what next? Well, we learned that “making space” for changes in an existing curriculum is hard. So we decided to take the opposite approach — let’s imagine that we are starting completely from scratch and think about what we want to include.  Next time I will tell you about our series of small-group workshops on “The Materials Scientist, Who is She?” — what are the competencies we want our students to acquire? —  and “Curriculum Redesign” — what kinds of learning modules might be most effective for teaching which skills? Stay tuned…