Wired Magazine

Students today are operating in a space that is unfamiliar to college and university administrators and faculty. This space is a gap between the traditional university approach to education and the way Millennials learn, and it has deep implications for educators at all levels. At the college and university level, there needs to be a focus on addressing the following question: What is the role of colleges and universities in the 21^st century in helping students achieve their goals to learn, to acquire knowledge and skills? At the K-12 level, the related question is: What is entailed to create a learning culture and to build learning platforms that fulfill the requirements of what school districts are mandated to teach and how students actually learn?

Students are experimenting with various ways to bridge this gap between the traditional university education and the real world skills that they need and desire. Students are proactively heralding in an era where they are self-teaching themselves through the Internet, extracurricular clubs, activities, and events. An example is how students who are interested in coding use events such as hackathons as a learning platform. (A hackathon is an event during which computer programmers and others in the field of software development collaborate intensively on software-related projects.) An earlier post commented:

On November 8-9, 2013 Yale hosted a hackathon called Y-Hack.  The numbers associated with Y-Hack are as follows: approximately 1,000 participants from 80 schools; $20,000 in prizes; approximately 35 company sponsors (including Google, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg LP, Bridgewater, Amazon Web Services, and Panorama Education). Y-Hack is an instance where students are active agents of academic capitalism because they are leveraging elements of Yale’s academic capitalist infrastructure to contemplate, design and create potential market ventures.

“We think Y-Hack is very aligned with President Salovey’s view for Yale,” stated one of the Y-Hack organizers. “With our hackathon,” he continued, “we want to inspire students to pursue these paths and to allow the already inspired students to create ventures. We challenge them to push each other and make the best products they can, and get rewarded for it. It’s rare to have so many intelligent and motivated minds from both the industrial and educational worlds together in one place with no other goal than to make something cool. It’s a pretty powerful atmosphere.” This commentary is in line with the message delivered by Yale President Salovey in his Inaugural Address: Our Educational Mission. He stressed a need for entrepreneurship at Yale. He wants to see the growth of student ventures: “We will also do more to nurture student entrepreneurs from every school and department.”

It is apparent to me now that the larger meaning for Yale of hosting Y-Hack is that students were filling the gap between what the university offers in traditional computer science education and how students learn to code. They were, moreover, engaging in a form of self-directed apprenticeship, marshalling university resources to facilitate an event where they could learn and experience coding in a high energy and interactive environment. One of the event organizers had the following observations about the larger meaning of Y-Hack: “It will be around after we graduate and continue to grow each year after that. With Y-Hack, students across the country have come to see Yale as an innovator in the technology, computer science, and engineering fields. And we are attempting to push [ourselves] further onto the world stage. We want to make sure that Yale students are actively contributing to and making a positive impact to the world by sharing their talents, creating value, and giving back to the community. It’s hard to predict how much impact Y-Hack could have, but we know for sure that it’s a move in the right direction.”

Y-Hack also attracted humanities students, a cohort that is not necessarily interested in technology related careers but have an interest in technology because they are in the generation of “digital natives.” There was an interesting article written about Yale’s hackathon, “YHackers: Behind the Scenes of Yale’s First Big Hackathon” by Nicole Clark, a rising junior in Pierson College. She described the impact that attending the event had on her as follows:

Despite their diversity of backgrounds and experiences, these leaders all seemed to think along the same lines. They knew about programming from learning on their own and going to hackathons. Not all of them were computer science majors. They told me that they were adapting to a rapidly evolving field by learning as they created. They didn’t just learn in the classroom, but used their own interests to fuel their creations. It was invigorating, as a student who is usually shunned out from these types of events, to be invited-even persuaded-to take part in the next hackathon.

Nicole does a wonderful job of capturing the essence of Y-Hack: an event intended for learning and experiencing coding in an intellectually intense and supportive environment. After this article appeared in the Yale Entrepreneur Magazine, a student-led publication, I asked her what she meant when she wrote about being shunned at technology oriented events. She explained that as an English major, she felt that Y-Hack was a welcoming environment for a non-technical person. Previously when she tried to get involved with [HackYale], a student-led organization for coders, she felt excluded because the application process to join [HackYale] requires technology proficiency.

Perhaps humanities students will be inspired by events like Y-Hack to raise their level of technological proficiency so that [HackYale] is an organic extension of their interest.

Benjamin Franklin as an apprentice

Last week’s post posited that at its core, the wide toolbox framework is a type of self-directed apprenticeship that constitutes a long game mind-set. It is prima facie evidence of a student’s desire and ability to learn across diverse academic disciplines and fields of knowledge. This approach to positioning yourself, like a golfer who is engaged in course management, suggests that a student is questioning the traditional academic paradigm where focus on a major transforms into a career. This self-directed learning experience is disruptive of the conventional approach to higher education: it challenges the conventional silo paradigm in academia. The wide toolbox framework, moreover, is for students who desire the ability to combine an understanding of the feasibility of a product or service (technology), focus on human intention or need (the humanities), and financial viability and sustainability (entrepreneurship). Fundamental to this self-directed apprenticeship is the compelling need of how to do college better given the dual reality of an interconnected global economy, and the challenge of having trained leaders for the 21^st century knowledge workforce.

Learning skills to create, build, invent, or innovate is an inherent part the wide toolbox framework. In fact, the espirit de corps of the wide toolbox cohort is their curiosity and desire to make things. Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, asserted in Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, “Physical products are increasingly just digital information put in physical form by robotic devices such as CNC mills.” “This information,” Anderson continues, “is a design, translated into instructions to automated production equipment.”

In an early post on this blog, it was noted that there were two major tribes pursuing entrepreneurship at Yale: the atoms and the bits.

During the course of an interview an informant made the comment that he operates with or manages atoms, as compared to the people in other parts of the entrepreneurship village who operate with or manage bits and bytes. This informant’s worldview of entrepreneurship is informed by innovating through the creation of physical artifacts in the real world, as compared to innovating through the creation of digital information in the on-line or virtual world. This way of thinking about innovation is instructive for me because it lends a perspective to how to think about innovators and designers. Much of the discussion in the press about entrepreneurship centers around businesses based on bits and bytes. For sociological analysis of groups and individuals these distinctions might work, but I believe that many innovations are hybrids. They are based on atoms, something tangible, something you can touch, but they run on software based on bits and bytes, something intangible.

Because the wide toolbox cohort is learning skills on their own and applying them to make things from bits and atoms they have kindred spirits in the Maker movement. Because of the comprehensiveness of an e-mail I received concerning the making of a maker, I thought that it would be informative to share an edited version here:

• Hand-in-hand with the development of the wide-toolbox is the presentation of the expanded maker-skills on one’s resume. There is a yet-to-be-fully-documented shift in resume formats with the new flavor telling “what you made” as a standard entry. A recent Yale graduate has an applicable “lesson from the trenches story.” The aero-space company where he was interviewing, asked him to redo his standard resume, and highlight what he made. This fall, we will host a resume workshop on how to update your resume to include things you have made.
• The maker-on-your-college-application trend combined with the maker-on-your-resume trend is a strong indicator of the need to add making skills to the list of required skills (thereby joining some of the well-established skills of communications, leadership, technical knowledge, and critical thinking).
• Regarding the “preparing the maker” storyline, a bit of evidence that this is a “beyond Yale” thing is the growing number of places that have or are preparing “academic maker spaces” (including the number of visitors to the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”) that are interested in our work. And on the high school level, two New York City high schools plus one upstate New York high school have visited CEID. There is even a thread of libraries-to-maker-spaces movement at various colleges (with a sub-thread of all libraries). There are existing high school models that are doing this as well, including our community’s high school. Also, colleges are coming on-line giving making its due credit with regards to admissions. Also Martin Culpepper’s new position at MIT is a demonstration of this phenomenon crossing over into academic leadership/organization. Woodie Flowers has been pushing this approach to learning for 30+ years. See the TedX Talk by Woodie.

This e-mail makes the point that being a maker is an identifiable talent that is in demand in the workplace, as well as on high school and college campuses. Combining the theoretical with the hands-on experience of creating, building, inventing or innovating things is a way to differentiate yourself from the preponderance of students who continue to take the path of trying to transform a conventional college major into a 21^st century career.

Whether you are in STEM or the humanities, you might benefit from attending a workshop on how to update your resume to include things you have made. In future posts I will be returning to this topic of resume presentation.

The wide toolbox approach, which I have been blogging about, is a unique way for a Yale cohort to prepare for a career in the 21^st century. Through this approach students are equipped to build things. Yet there is no implied value judgment about whether building hardware is better than building software, or whether building a for-profit venture is better than building a non-profit. The implicit value proposition of the wide toolbox is that in the 21^st century entrepreneurship or building a business is perhaps the greatest opportunity for making an impact because it’s a tool for making a change in the world. The wide toolbox is the ethos that links a cohort to the thought world of Yale; it is the basis of a sub-cultural system.  At its core, the wide toolbox is a self-apprenticeship that constitutes a long game mind-set. It is prima facie evidence of a student’s ability and desire to learn across academic disciplines and fields of knowledge. This approach to positioning yourself, like a golfer who is engaged in course management, suggests that a student is questioning the traditional academic paradigm where focus on a major transforms into a career.

The idiosyncratic road to entrepreneurship of a recent Yale graduate supports this proposition. She majored in art but because of her interest in design and making things, she essentially took enough engineering classes to be able to signify that she minored in engineering. After graduation she worked as a design associate in an academic design studio where she helped engineering majors, as well as non-engineering majors who were using the design studio to make class-related and extra-curricular-related projects. Today she is a co-founder of a start-up that is proto-typing a bio-medical device.

In the post “Smart People Should Build Things,” the point was made that we need our most eminently employable people to start and run companies.  People who have skills, exposure, credibility, resources, talents, character, persistence, know-how, networks, cultural capital, and intellectual capital should build things. I believe that exposing undergrads to entrepreneurship will make them more likely to perceive the entrepreneurship path as a rational choice. A big part of the battle to convince students that entrepreneurship is a viable option is to have enough examples of successful student-led start-ups that subsequent classes believe that success is obtainable by them and their peers.

The case for a long term mind-set that encompasses the wide toolbox can also be made by examining the multi-decade trend of risk and impermanence that has become an intrinsic component of the “new mode” of employment in America. So-called secure or stable jobs are things of the past. They have been replaced by freelancers and contract workers who are employed on a short-term project-specific basis. According to a study conducted by the software company Intuit in 2010, by 2020 more than 40% of the U.S. workforce will be so-called contingent workers. That is more than 60 million people.

It is a fact that graduates who major in math, engineering and computer science fare better in today’s job market than their counterparts in liberal arts. But this situation could be addressed by familiarizing liberal arts majors with the builder/maker/creator bias that epitomizes engineering and computer science. This process would be learned as a part of their adoption of the wide toolbox approach because it lies at the intersection of the humanities, technology, and entrepreneurship.

The Yale cohort that my research investigates is changing the nature of what we have traditionally thought of as a “job” or career path for educational elites. Unlike other generations of the middle-class dispossessed who relied on an employer to their detriment, the Yale cohort is using entrepreneurship in a proactive way to avoid the downsizing and outsourcing phenomena that some of their Baby Boomer parents have gone through, as well as give themselves the opportunity to define what meaningful work is on their own terms. Researchers have demonstrated that white-collar workers are increasingly vulnerable to many of the same economic trends, such as off-shoring of jobs and automation, which have eliminated blue-collar jobs during the past half-century. Offshoring is merely a way station to the automation of routine tasks, assert MIT professors Erik Bryjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age.

“Software is eating the world,” says Marc Andreessen, characterizing the major economic trend impacting business today. Andreessen, a general partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, goes on to say:

More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

Strategies to combat these multi-decade trends are discussed in the literature about 21^st century knowledge workers. In her book A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment, anthropologist Carrie Lane, characterizes the strategy her informants use to participate in the economy as “career management.” It is a type of free agency, whereby the individual employee focuses on building his “brand” because he is a “company of one.” In his book The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, refers to this career strategy as the “start-up of you.” Hoffman theorized that Millennials are becoming the entrepreneurs of their own lives.  Lane believes that the ethos of career management is embedded in the economic philosophy of neoliberalism.

The cohort at Yale that is adopting the wide toolbox approach, appears to be aware of the kind of ideas that Lane and Hoffman are espousing; they know, for instance, that they want to avoid Wall Street firms where they would have to adopt a defensive strategy inside a company similar to Lane’s “a company of one” or Hoffman’s the startup of you.” This point is highlighted in an article in the New York Times, “A Mad Scramble for Young Bankers.” The article focuses of the frenzy by private equity firms to make offers of employment to recent college graduates who work at investment banks as analysts in a two year program. These offers of employment are typically made 6 – 12 months after the analysts start working at the investment banks, or 12 – 18 months before their employment at the investment bank ends. These analysts are acting in their own best interest in securing a future position while currently working at investment banks. The unstable environment of the investment banking industry fosters the defensive strategy discussed in the New York Times article.

Through the wide toolbox approach to skills development my Yale cohort are acknowledging that entrepreneurship is an alternative career strategy. They are also acting as free agents, but they are executing their career management strategy by opting out of the Wall Street route. Instead they are positioning themselves to build the environment that they work in, and to define the types of problems that they work on.

Student-oriented infrastructure for entrepreneurship is indispensable to instill the importance of becoming an entrepreneur, and not just an innovator or inventor. Through entrepreneurship pedagogy and venture creation, students learn how to build something that people want, how to implement their ideas, how to assess the value of their contribution to a venture, and most importantly, how to maintain control of their intellectual capital and their intellectual property.

Recent posts on this site have focused on the idea that the future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways. Many economists believe that America’s (if not the entire globe’s) long-term prosperity rests in substantial part on its store of human capital. We have been developing the notion that the wide tool box is an approach that students can take to learning skills and developing a mind-set that broadens their perspective for perceiving new opportunities regardless of the field or career that they pursue. The wide tool box approach to preparing oneself provides for a wide-ranging apprenticeship in your twenties that expands possibilities as you get older. This approach offers a way to avoid the rigid, singular path of digesting a college major and attempting to replicate the career paths of prior generations. Paraphrasing Louis Pasteur’s famous quote “Chance favors a prepared mind;” I would state that perceiving opportunity in a rapidly changing and highly competitive environment favors a prepared mind.      

A recent graduate of Yale who majored in engineering is emblematic of an engineer with a wide tool box skill-set. Although he planned to major in engineering he took two art classes during his freshman year. He concentrated in mechanical engineering because, at the time, he thought that it was the broadest engineering sub-field. It would allow him to create bio-medical apparatus and electrical devices. He viewed mechanical engineering as the core of engineering. It would allow him to acquire electrical engineering knowledge and material science knowledge, which would enable him to understand how things worked and why things break.

As a part of his self-directed apprenticeship he was a member of Yale’s chapter of Design for America (“DFA”). DFA is a way for people with different backgrounds to learn design thinking; and design solutions to problems in the New Haven community. In DFA he learned how to define a problem, and how to design a contextualized solution. This type of experiential learning is hard to get from the typical classroom.

Currently, he is a co-founder of a start-up that is developing a bio-medical device which is being field tested in clinical trials. Interestingly, he is the only member of the three person team that majored in engineering. The other co-founders majored in political science and art, further demonstrating how the early adopters of the wide tool box approach are using their skill-set. Another aspect of the wide tool box is a hunger for knowledge, a curiosity that drives learning on one’s own. He is self-teaching himself coding so that his team has the in-house coding expertise which is needed to design the analytics interface that they want to offer doctors and their patients who use the bio-medical device.

If you think of your career as a building that will be built-out in multiple phases, as the mechanical engineer discussed above does, the wide tool box contains the instruments that you will need to construct a solid foundation for your career and your intellectual life. An alternative way to think about this process is that during college, and perhaps in high school, you are creating a self-directed apprenticeship. In Mastery, Robert Greene offers the following guidance about acquiring the wide tool box skill-set:

The model goes like this: You want to learn as many skills as possible, following the direction that circumstances lead you to, but only if they are related to your deepest interests. Like a hacker, you value the process of self-discovery and making things that are of the highest quality. You avoid the trap of following one set career path, you are not sure where this will all lead, but you are taking full advantage of the openness of information, all of the knowledge about skills at our disposal.

In the vein of a hacker, “You are the programmer of this wide-ranging apprenticeship, within the loose constraints of your personal interests,” Greene wrote. In addition to the resources available at the university, the Internet can be seen as one big MOOC (Massive Open Outline Course). The intent is to establish oneself as an active learner rather than as a passive learner: you are proactively assembling abstract, as well as experiential knowledge. And through the filter of the wide tool box you are able to synthesize information and data, in order to make connections, recognize trends and uncover opportunities that are not visible to others.

In recent blog posts I have argued that the wide toolbox skill-set provides students a broad intellectual perspective from which to perceive and interpret real world problems, and a skill-set to innovate solutions to human needs and pressing global challenges. In addition, the wide toolbox empowers students to be innovators for the knowledge economy. A student who is developing a wide toolbox articulated the flexibility that he is afforded by pursuing this path: “I work hard and fill my days with interesting experiences. I’m not working toward any career specifically. I think that career opportunities, at least as a graduate from Yale, come as a side-effect from staying curious and working on interesting problems.” Now that I have outlined the argument for pursuing the wide toolbox for intellectual advancement, this post will make the argument for pursuing the wide toolbox for financial prosperity.

My own thesis is that the wide toolbox is the antidote to capital which over at least the last half century has been pulling the levers of the global economy and the American economy. I am trying to create an awareness that Millennials who make a conscious choice can create their own jobs by controlling their intellectual capital and the intellectual property they produce. Alternatively, if they are not inclined to being owners of their enterprise, they at least have a mind-set that enables them to excel as forward thinking 21^st century employees who have had experience implementing original insights and ideas. The theory is that the wide toolbox empowers students to push back against the power and leverage of capital.

“The real winners of the future will not be the providers of cheap labor or the owners of ordinary capital, both of whom will be increasingly squeezed by automation,” stated Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and Michael Spence, the authors of “New World Order: Labor, Capital, and Ideas in the Power Law Economy,” which was published in Foreign Affairs. The authors continue, “Fortune will instead favor a third group, those who can innovate and create new products, services and business models.” This group, arguably, will include wide tool boxers. The authors posit the following economic rationale for acquiring this skill-set: “In a free market, the biggest premiums go to the scarcest inputs needed for productions.”

In an era driven by digital technologies and their associated economic characteristics, increasingly ordinary labor and ordinary capital are commodities. People with ideas and innovations, not workers nor investors, will be the scarcest resource. This week I saw how an investor can distinguish itself as a scarce resource. I participated in the Y Combinator Startup School New York 2014. The consistent message from the speakers, heads of ventures that had come out of the Y Combinator accelerator, was that Paul Graham and the other principals of Y Combinator had provided them with much more than seed capital. (Admittedly, this was a hand-picked group of Y Combinator success stories.) The Y Combinator partners regularly interacted with these company founders, helping them hone their business concepts and models, as well as offering encouragement. And these founders were given direct and, at times, brutally honest feedback. Such as a partner’s comment to Zach Sims, CEO and co-founder of Codeacademy that he and his partner had the “worst ratio of intelligence to ideas; so smart but such stupid ideas.”

Codecacademy is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in six different programming languages. As of January 2014, the site had over 24 million users who had completed over 100 million exercises. The message of speakers, such as Zach Sims, is that Y Combinator is not ordinary capital; it provides an extraordinary level of added value through mentorship and access to its vast network of alums and high-quality investors.

Because of the network effect of digital technology a product or service becomes more valuable the more people use it; this phenomenon results in a winner-take-all economic structure. If this proposition is true, then the advantage goes to first movers, and those people who understand how to create the best customer experience. Digital technology amplifies these advantages and the associated financial results. For example, a startup can instantly become a global company: in 2014 Facebook acquired WhatsApp, a 55 person company for $19 billion; Facebook, a 3,000 person company, at the time of its initial public offering in 2012 was valued at approximately $100 billion and today it has 1.23 billion monthly active users worldwide; its market cap is $165 billion.

People who have the ability to combine an understanding of product feasibility, focus on human intention or need, and financial viability and sustainability create the potential to achieve an outstanding advantage in their pursuit of success. This is true whether you define success as producing a profitable company or finding solutions to intractable global challenges.

This post is a follow-on to last week’s post: “Synopsis of an Ethnography Situated at an Ivy.” The wide toolbox metaphor is core to my argument that a broad approach is necessary to prepare leaders for the 21st century knowledge workforce: learning that combines STEM’s focus on feasibility, the liberal arts’ focus on human intention, and business’ focus on viability. The wide toolbox concept expands the narrow lens through which students who major in humanities fields and STEM disciplines see the world; it provides students an enhanced perspective though which to perceive and interpret real world problems, and a skill-set to innovate solutions to human needs and pressing global challenges. Also, the experiential nature of entrepreneurship is an important component because through the process of ideation to product or service launch, students develop a mind-set about how to discover ways to implement their original insights and ideas.

An e-mail I received concerning last week’s post raised an important question: Are any of the Yale elements, or are the ensemble of Yale elements, unique (and valuable) and if so, in what way? Just to recap the five key elements of the Yale wide toolbox learning model (the “Elements”) are as follows:

• Student-oriented infrastructure that covers entrepreneurship pedagogy, academic maker spaces, venture creation, and for profit and social entrepreneurship.
• Mentors for students from academia, business, government, and not-for-profit sectors.
• Alumni engagement and active participation.
• Championing led by the institution’s governing Board, administration, and faculty.
• Encourage learning that develops a wide toolbox: critical thinking skills, history, design thinking, an ability to work with and interpret numbers and statistics, access to the insights of great writers and artists, a willingness to experiment, the ability to navigate ambiguity, basic understanding of technology, science and engineering.

The short answer to the question posed in the e-mail is that the Elements are not necessarily unique to Yale, but how the Elements are combined or weighted will vary depending on an institution’s learning culture. “Learning culture,” says Richard K. Miller, President of Olin College of Engineering, “is not about the courses.” In his speech at UC Berkeley, Miller further stated that learning culture is about how students think about who is responsible for what they learn, the meaning and purpose of what they are doing in the classroom and in extracurricular activities, and how faculty think about their role in the institution. Yale controls all aspects of the Elements, whereas Olin, which only offers a degree in engineering, has partnered with Babson College to offer its students access to the business component of the Elements and it has partnered with Wellesley College to offer its students access to the liberal arts component. Because of these partnerships Olin is able to treat engineering as a holistic discipline and enable its students to develop the wide toolbox skill-set. This trio of colleges creates “a virtual university.”

During the spring 2014 semester, several professors and students from Olin visited Yale to tour the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”) and to meet with CEID staff. (I attended a luncheon meeting with the Olin contingent.) Their stated goal for the visit was to gather information about how to design and configure an academic maker space. CEID, among educators at all levels, is considered one of the premier undergraduate maker spaces in the country.

Olin is an interesting comparative case study because it was founded with the mission to change how undergraduate engineering is taught. It was intended to be a laboratory for experimenting with various pedagogic methodologies. Olin approaches engineering education from an interdisciplinary perspective. It focuses on engineering as a creative discipline and prepares students to be engineering innovators. For instance, a senior capstone project must be in the arts, the humanities or entrepreneurship. The Olin learning model has design thinking as a core principle: everything begins with people. Olin’s holistic view of what it means to be an engineer is not just about applied science. This viewpoint sees engineering education at the intersection of engineering, business, and liberal arts.

The wide toolbox is central to how I am interpreting the relevance of my work in the present. Moreover, I hope to make a contribution to a larger debate about the role of the humanities in secondary education. Or alternatively, to make a contribution to the debate about how to educate students for an uncertain future due to the rapidity of technological changes and their impacts on all aspects of our lives. Both debates share a common view that there is a need to foster a holistic approach to producing a new creative mind-set regardless of whether students aspire to work in the fields of medicine, law, business, education, science, or engineering. Ultimately, I want to make a contribution to the advancement of teaching, mentoring and coaching future leaders of 21st century knowledge workers.

The synopsis of my research is as follows: This dissertation is an examination of how an institutional shift in support of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (“STEM”) has transformed how students at Yale, a traditionally liberal arts college, prepare as 21^st century knowledge workers. In particular it analyzes a cohort that uses the resources associated with this strategic shift to assemble a portfolio of skills: a wide toolbox. At its core this wide toolbox defines a unique level of preparedness for future leaders of the 21^st century knowledge workforce. Students’ interest in innovation, design, and entrepreneurship is a manifestation of Yale’s strategic shift in favor of STEM. There is an emerging debate, nonetheless, about the role of the humanities in American education and concerns about the STEM disciplines eclipsing humanities fields in relevance and career prospects. The wide toolbox skill-set, ironically, is formed at the intersection of the humanities and technology.

During the process of thinking about how to contextualize my research it is becoming clear to me that because colleges and universities are innovation hubs they are part of a global competition among businesses for talent and the competition among national governments for economic prosperity and in some respects, their national security. At the level of universities and colleges, there is competition to attract the top students and faculty, as well as offer a compelling vision of the future to prospective patrons who are deciding whether to support a college or university’s development campaigns.

A fundamental question about my research at Yale is whether Yale is representative of a sea change in how technology, science, engineering, and innovation are being conceptualized, taught and practiced or whether it is unique in American higher education. The evidence supports the conclusion that Yale is representative of a sea change in how technology, science, engineering and innovation are being reimagined in secondary education, and a trend in education to allocate more resources to STEM:

• In 1994, reestablished the dean of engineering post.
• In 2000, Yale committed to invest more than $1 billion in facilities for science, medicine, and technology.
• In 2005, the Daniel L. Malone Engineering Center was completed.
• In 2008 the Faculty of Engineering was recognized as the School of Engineering & Applied Sciences.
• Setting an admissions target of 30% of incoming freshmen as prospective STEM majors.
• Creation of the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design as a design studio for undergraduates.

The macro-level context for these changes is the realization that a primary driver of our national economy and related job creation is innovation, largely derived from advances in technology, science and engineering. The 2010 governmental report “Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited” updated a 2005 report that “focused upon the ability of Americans to compete for employment in a job market that increasingly knows no geographic boundaries.” One of the conclusions of the 2010 report is that “Substantial evidence continues to indicate that over the long term the great majority of newly created jobs are the indirect or direct result of advancements in science and technology, thus making these and related disciplines assume what might be described as disproportionate importance.”

There appears to be unprecedented institutional support for preparing students beyond the traditional career paths of Wall Street, management consulting, law and medicine. Yale seems to be making resources available for students ranging from mentors to help a student ideate and conceptualize a market opportunity, and build a sustainable business to providing seed or early-stage capital so that students are not dependent on venture capitalists to fund budding enterprises. Several question arise concerning the Yale model: What are the challenges to implementing the model? Is successful implementation dependent on having the level of resources that Yale has? These questions are important to determine whether the Yale model is applicable to other educational institutions. The five key elements of the Yale model are:

• Student-orientated infrastructure that covers entrepreneurship pedagogy, academic maker spaces, venture creation, and for profit and social entrepreneurship.
• Mentors for students from academia, business, government, and not-for-profit sectors.
• Alumni engagement and active participation.
• Championing led by the institution’s governing Board, administration, and faculty.
• Encourage learning that develops a wide toolbox: critical thinking skills, history, design thinking, an ability to work with and interpret numbers and statistics, access to the insights of great writers and artists, a willingness to experiment, the ability to navigate ambiguity, basic understanding of technology, science and engineering.

Leonardo da Vinci – Self portrait

“Very mature and balanced view,” is a comment I received concerning last week’s post. The e-mail continues, “The maturity of the views expressed in today’s blog was extraordinary I think, and way out in front of the crowd.  The reference to Peter Thiel was particularly apt.” I agree. So this week’s post is a continuation of last week’s guest blog post. The arc of the story underlying my ethnographic research is the strategic shift in support of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (“STEM”) and the implications for how students are preparing themselves as 21^st century knowledge workers. This story of the ascendancy of STEM is juxtaposed to an emerging debate about the role of the humanities in American education and concerns about the STEM disciplines eclipsing humanities fields in relevance and career prospects. Interestingly, the wide toolbox skill-set is formed at the intersection of the humanities and technology.

Excerpts of the Q&A continued:

Extracurricular activities are an important part of the Yale undergraduate experience.  Describe the extracurricular activities you are involved in, and why?

Design for America: I’m a studio leader of DFA, a club that aims to make local, social impact through interdisciplinary design. There are about 20 students in the club, who are divided into four project teams. Each project team is given a different design challenge at the beginning of the semester. Last year’s projects focused on education, natural disaster relief, homelessness, and improving quality of life for the blind. Every other week, we hold studio-wide workshops where we walk teams through the different steps of Design for America’s design process. The focus is on going out into the field and getting a good grasp of the users’ needs before you start designing for them. The DFA process is a way of making sure that teams develop a very deep understanding of the problem they’re working on before they dive straight into brainstorming solutions.

I’m involved in this club for a few reasons. One, because I really enjoy working in interdisciplinary teams on problems that really matter. It’s a little frustrating that we spend so much time in classes working on problem sets and homework assignments and not that much time engaging with the surrounding community. DFA gives me an opportunity to use design—a considered approach to problem solving—to help make an impact in people’s lives. I’m also very interested in DFA from an organizational design perspective. It’s a huge challenge to take 20 freshmen, split them into teams, teach them about design, and keep them motivated for eight months to keep working on their project. The process of figuring out how to best run this mini-organization has been very fun and rewarding.

Describe your view of the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design as a physical place, and a place to garner intellectual inspiration.

I’m in the CEID all the time. Design for America as well as the magazine that I’m editor-in-chief of hold their meetings there. It’s a really exciting place to be because everyone is working on such crazy, interesting things. This semester I saw everything from a Mars Rover, to a quad-copter, to a violin that was being played with an electric transducer rather than strings. I often describe the CEID as an “aquarium of creators” because the giant glass wall reminds me of a fish tank. Tourists peer in and tap on the glass when they walk by. The CEID opened my freshman year, so I’ve sort of grown up with it in a way. My experience at Yale would certainly be a lot different without the CEID. It’s a constant reminder to me that people are working on interesting things, and I should be too! The atmosphere and the creativity is contagious. It’s hard to describe, but being there really makes me want to make things. I also associate the CEID with Joe Zinter, who has been one of my mentors throughout my college career thus far. He’s one of the most creative, thoughtful people I’ve met at Yale so far. The CEID is in many ways an embodiment of him.

How would you describe the intellectual environment at Yale?

I’d say the intellectual environment at Yale varies as a function of what you study. I’m generalizing here, but Math/Computer Science people tend to be very dedicated to what they’re studying and less concerned about their GPAs. There’s a website where the Computer Science department posts advice from past students to future CS majors. One of the most common suggestions is that it doesn’t matter what grades you get in the classes, so long as you really learn. I think the Political Science/Econ folks don’t really see it that way at all. They’re very focused on GPA because most of the jobs they’re going for (Wall Street/consulting) have GPA cutoffs. As a result, they’re more likely to take “gut classes” (easy classes) and not be as intellectually engaged. I’m making huge generalizations, of course, but this seems to be the trend at least from my experience. Overall, people seem to be very curious and interested in things.

But Yale is also definitely not filled with stereotypical nerds who spend all day talking about their classes. I think Brad Rosen, a professor of a class I took called Law Technology & Culture, put it best: “Assume everyone is silently brilliant until proven otherwise.”

I have stated that the rising junior who has been featured here and in last week’s post is emblematic of the wide toolbox metaphor. He is cutting edge and innovative in how he is going about preparing himself as a future leader of 21st century knowledge workers. Thinking strategically about the cohort that he is a part of, I will attempt to answer a set of questions:

• Which larger population are they representative of?
• How representative are they of the Yale student body?
• In what ways are they distinct?
• What do they have in common with the general student body?
• What do they have in common with other students who are developing a wide toolbox?
• What are the critical demographics among students who are developing a wide toolbox?

Albert Einstein

On the one-year anniversary of this blog I thought that it would be interesting for you to hear directly from someone who has been instrumental in shaping my view of the incredibly talented students that attend Yale. Moreover, this rising junior is emblematic of the wide toolbox metaphor that I have been using to describe a portfolio of skills that at its core defines a unique level of preparedness for future leaders of the 21^st century knowledge workforce. This skill-set is formed at the intersection of the humanities and technology.

In an earlier post “The Wide Toolbox,” I cited Deborah Fitzgerald, professor of History of Technology, and dean of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Fitzgerald asserts that while students need advanced technical knowledge and skills, they also need “an in-depth understanding of human complexities – the political, cultural, and economic realities that shape our existence-as well as fluency in the powerful forms of thinking and creativity cultivated by the humanities, arts, and social sciences.”  She further states, “Calling on both STEM and humanities disciplines – as mutually informing modes of knowledge – we aim to give students a toolbox brimming over with tools to support them throughout their careers and lives.” For Fitzgerald, this toolbox includes: critical thinking skills, history, anthropology, an ability to work with and interpret numbers and statistics, access to the insights of great writers and artists, a willingness to experiment, to open up to change, and the ability to navigate ambiguity.

The following Q & A is excerpted from a larger set of questions.

Why did you choose Yale? What were your other options?

Yale was actually the only school I applied to. My other favorites were Washington University in St. Louis and Pomona, but I got into Yale early action and decided not to apply anywhere else.

I really liked the vibe I got when I visited Yale. What’s great about the school is that it seems like they try to recruit people who have a “thing.” Everyone is very passionate about a particular pursuit. I love the diversity on campus. Not necessarily the racial diversity, but the diversity of thought and the diversity of interests. Yale on the whole is more arts inclined and seems to attract a wide array of personalities. Academically, Yale is a place with the perfect balance of flexibility and requirements. You have to fulfill certain distributional requirements, but they give you a ton of flexibility within that requirement. The fact that you can take 2/3 of your classes outside of your major was also a big draw for me. Lastly, the residential college system is incredible and there aren’t many schools that have something like it. It gives you a built in community that lasts all four years and a “home base” of sorts, which is really helpful when adjusting to a totally new way of life.

What did you expect to achieve in college?

I really liked the Steve Jobs quote about “putting a dent in the universe,” (emphasis added) and wanted to put myself in a position where I’d be able to make my own little dent. I’ve always been a very curious person, and all I really wanted to do in college was to satisfy that curiosity. I also wanted to surround myself with really interesting people because my high school was filled with kids who were pretty apathetic about everything. More specifically, I wanted to double major in Computer Science and Political Science and do something at the intersection of law and technology. (I was a big fan of Larry Lessig.) To be honest, I also went to college because it’s just the normal thing to do in the area where I’m from. I wanted to be able to check off that box.

What is your college major and why did you chose it?

My major is Cognitive Science. Cog Sci is made up of six sub-fields: neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, economics, computer science, and psychology. I chose the major in part because of the academic flexibility it gives me. In the Cog Sci major, you pick a theme you want to focus on and then design a course plan around that theme. The courses you take can be drawn from any one of those six sub-fields, which means I’ll have a lot of exposure to a lot of different ideas. It doesn’t make sense to me to study anything in isolation (especially not something as complex as the human mind). I think the most interesting discoveries happen at the intersection between different fields, and I’m excited that my major will give me the tools to think across disciplinary boundaries.

Describe your interest in innovation, design, and entrepreneurship.

I’m not sure I like the word innovation. It’s sort of a buzzword that seems like it’s lost a lot of its meaning. If every new photo-sharing app in Silicon Valley says they are “innovating”, then what does the word really mean anymore?

I first became really interested in design after watching the documentary Objectified. That movie showed me that design is all around us, even if we fail to notice it. Almost everything around us is designed. Designers have a really interesting job because they make choices that impact our everyday lives—from the shape of a spoon handle to the architecture of a jet engine. Learning about design makes you look at the world in a new way. You have a new appreciation for objects because you realize they didn’t just appear; they’re the product of someone’s hard work. Design, as they say, “isn’t about how things look. It’s about how they work.”

I became interested in entrepreneurship when I started reading TechCrunch in 7th grade. TechCrunch is a website that writes about new tech startups. I thought it was so cool that someone only a little order than me (e.g. Mark Zuckerberg) could start something in his dorm room and have an effect on millions of people’s lives just a few years later.

Since reading Evgeny Morozov’s book To Save Everything Click Here, I’ve become more skeptical of the culture surrounding design/entrepreneurship/technology. I think the whole industry could use a healthy dose of skepticism. It’s filled with a lot of fanatics like Peter Thiel who think that technology and creativity will, together, fix all the world’s problems. They talk about what technology “wants” as if it has a mind of its own. They think throwing software at a challenge will be enough to solve it. There’s a lot of sensationalized rhetoric out there about how Twitter, Facebook, etc. are changing everything and how nothing will ever be the same again. This sort of response is characteristic of most revolutions, but I think the Valley would do well with a little more skepticism. There are two sides to every coin. For example, even though social media has vastly improved communication, it has also allowed for the sort of surveillance we’re seeing with the NSA now.

What are your career aspirations, and how are you preparing yourself for the opportunities in your chosen post-graduate endeavors?

I don’t have specific career aspirations yet. I like to describe my future in terms of visibility (like the kind airplane pilots talk about). My visibility right now is about six months out. I know what I’m doing this summer, and I know I’m going back to Yale in the fall. Beyond that, everything gets a little more foggy. I really like Paul Graham’s advice, from his essay “What You’ll Wish You’d Known.”

Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. This is what most successful people actually do anyway. Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn’t have an engine, you can’t fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a replacement for “don’t give up on your dreams.” Stay upwind.

I work hard and fill my days with interesting experiences. I’m not working toward any career specifically. I think that career opportunities, at least as a graduate from Yale, come as a side-effect from staying curious and working on interesting problems.

Do you have an interest in starting a venture while in college or after graduating?

I’m not one of those people who wants to start a startup just for the sake of being able to say that I started a startup. I’m not opposed to the idea, but I’m also not obsessed with doing it. If I happen to have an idea that a) I think would add value to the world and b) would best manifest itself in the form of a business, then I would start a venture. If not, I would do other work that I find meaningful. It’s my belief that the best kind of startups form organically out of a good idea, rather than out of the desire to start a business just for the hell of it.