The Making of A Whole New Engineer: Four Unexpected Lessons for Engineering Educators and Education Researchers

As we were putting the final touches on the production of our new book, A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education (Goldberg & Somerville, 2014), we were reflecting on large writing projects, in general, and how easy it is to underestimate the amount of work and learning that goes into completing one. The tendency is to think, “This will be easy. We’ll just write down what we know about subject X and it will be good.” Of course, you start the project, and find that you didn’t know as much as you thought you did, and you had a lot of learning and figuring out to get to the end. Of course, some of this is the human tendency to underestimate difficulty and overestimate capacity, in general, as pointed out in The Invisible Gorilla (Chabris & Simon, 2009) and related research. If human beings were more realistic about the scope of such projects, it’s a reasonable question to ask whether many would start them. This time, however, with A Whole New Engineer, the misunderestimation took on a different flavor. Yes, we underestimated both the task complexity and learning required, but this time we also missed the deeper nature of the task. In the past, what started as largely a textbook or monograph or research paper turned out that way. This time, we thought we were writing a how-to manual on engineering education reform with some personal anecdotes, but the deeper nature of the project didn’t reveal itself until we were well into the project. In this guest editorial, we’d like to share what we think were some of the deeper and unexpected lessons of writing the book. We’ll start by talking about a number of precursor activities to the book and continue by talking about the four lessons. Two are lessons about writing for a more general audience (in case others wish to do likewise). Two are some of the deeper insights of the project. We’ll conclude with some reflective questions for the field of engineering education research.