Taking the leap into Scholarly Activity

What does it feel like to step into the world of academic conferences for the first time—not as a spectator, but as a speaker? For Laura Neasmith, it was a journey that began with hesitation and ended in confidence. At this year’s IEEE EDUCON, Laura shared research rooted in her MSc study on collaboration across staff roles in Multidisciplinary Engineering Education (MEE). In this blog, she reflects on the experience of presenting at an international conference, what she learned from others, and why professional services voices matter in engineering education.

I confess that when I was initially encouraged to submit an abstract to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE) conference, EDUCON, I was fairly confident that it would never be accepted and saw it more as part of a learning process of entering into scholarly activity. As someone not from a traditional academic background, imagine my surprise when the abstract was accepted, and a paper was then needed to accompany it. I had to accept that I was going to be attending my first ever academic conference as a contributor rather than an attendee. 

Exploring collaboration in MEE 

My submission was based on MSc research I had completed the year before, which explored interprofessional collaboration between staff groups within Multidisciplinary Engineering Education (MEE). I was particularly curious about how these collaborative efforts might influence the professional identity of the staff involved. At MEE, academic, technical, and administrative staff work together to co-deliver teaching in the labs, a model that is quite different from traditional teaching delivery and I wanted to understand how this unique setup might shape how staff perceive their roles.

To explore this, I conducted interviews with members of the team and carried out a thematic analysis of their responses. My findings suggested that working across role boundaries in this interprofessional way had a significant positive impact on the student experience. The shared ownership of teaching delivery led to more cohesive and integrated lab pedagogy. I also found that recognising and valuing expertise across different job roles contributed to greater staff morale and job satisfaction.

While the study did not provide conclusive evidence that this way of working directly affects professional identity positively or negatively it still offered useful insights. As a small scale study, it added to my understanding of collaboration across job groupings. Ideally, this kind of research could be replicated in a more traditional academic department, with the recognition that MEE’s interdisciplinary foundation may influence the outcomes.

Presenting at EDUCON 

EDUCON is a global engineering education conference, and this one was hosted by Queen Mary University in London. This year, the conference organisers were particularly interested in submissions relating to multidisciplinary approaches in engineering education, and so the research I had undertaken seemed to complement this field. 

Attending such a prestigious conference, being in the company of hundreds of accomplished engineers, was daunting. Being a professional services staff member, these environments can feel overly ‘academic’ but everyone I interacted with during my time there was supportive, interested and happy to share their experiences. My own presentation went smoothly, and although I was nervous, I felt I was in good company with the other presenters. I was asked a great question from the audience about how the retention rate of the team could be attributed to the collaborative efforts within it which made me reflect on how unusual we are in MEE for supporting staff to develop outside of their job boundaries. 

Learning from Others 

I was also able to attend some really fantastic sessions; a highlight was from one of the keynote speakers, Professor Susan Lord from the University of San Diego. Her approach to applying ‘real world’ ethical challenges into her curriculum and how she engaged her students in thinking more contextually about how they will apply their engineering degree was particularly interesting. 

She described replacing outdated and irrelevant examples, like bridge building, with case studies more meaningful to her electrical engineering students. One example was the manufacture of tantalum in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, used in mobile phones. This introduced ethical questions around conflict mining, civil unrest, and the rise of illicit markets. It provided a much more relevant and thought provoking ethical scenario for future electrical engineers, while also preparing them for the real life dilemmas they might face in industry.

This made me reflect more broadly on learning. When we feel that something applies to us, when we feel involved, I believe our learning is deeper and more lasting.  You can read 

a link to a chapter she collaborated on about ethical issues in engineering here: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003464259-20. 

Reflections 

The overall experience of attending EDUCON was enjoyable for me; I really liked the opportunity to hear about initiatives happening across the sector. I feel very appreciative of the chance to be a small part of the overall event and would encourage others who perhaps feel overwhelmed at the idea of entering into ‘academic’ environments to give it a go Certainly the idea of presenting was much more terrifying when compared to the actuality of presenting. One thing that helped was reminding myself that my perspective, coming from professional services, added value precisely because it was different.