The Undergraduate Professional Communication Program, with its discipline-specific focus, encourages electrical and computer engineering students to understand the language and conventions of their chosen field with the goal of acculturating them into the discipline’s discourse community. Communication skills are taught throughout the curriculum, giving students multiple opportunities to engage in academic and professional writing and speaking situations.

Collaboration between writing faculty and engineering faculty is the driving force behind the program’s success and has resulted in the creation of several innovative assignments and in the improvement of assessment instruments and evaluation rubrics. Much attention has been placed on creating a learning environment that fosters the development of critical thinking through the use of both “traditional” academic assignments such as lab reports and “nontraditional” workplace-oriented assignments such as user’s manuals. Thus, applied communications and transferability of skills are important goals of the program.

Writing consultants also play an integral part in the Program’s success. Graduate teaching assistants from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering are trained as writing consultants who act in a dual capacity as both tutor and evaluator. Writing consultants are responsible for evaluating student writing and for providing meaningful feedback on all writing assignments. Additionally, they spend at least three hours per week working face-to-face with students in small group sessions or in individual conferences. Students can make an appointment or drop in to see any consultant during any stage in the writing process. All consultants are centrally located in Van Leer C-448, the Communication Studio.

All GTA writing consultants are trained to analyze the discourse practices within the field of electrical and computer engineering. Understanding the rhetorical characteristics, communication patterns, and the language of the discipline enables the consultants to work more effectively with undergraduate students who are themselves in the process of initiation into the larger engineering discourse community.

The Undergraduate Professional Communication Program is strongly influenced by the principles espoused by both Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines movements. While the UPC Program draws strength and credibility from the premises of WAC and WID, it also recognizes the limitations of focusing entirely on written communication skills. As a result, undergraduate engineering students are taught public speaking and oral presentation skills, and they are shown how to make effective use of visuals and graphics (for use in both text-based documents and PowerPoint presentations).

The Program’s main objective is “to ensure that all undergraduate students who receive degrees from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering can communicate effectively (in both oral and written form) with their peers.” The emphasis on written, oral, and visual communication is the result of several factors, including those outlined below:

EAC/ABET’s requirement that competence in written and oral communication must be demonstrated within the curriculum by each engineering student (section I.C.3.g.).

Growing awareness within the School of ECE of the need for communication skills in a workplace increasingly reliant upon communication technology.

Feedback from industry and alumni that explicitly identifies communication skills among the most desirable abilities employers are seeking and as essential to career growth for the individual.

The innovative, student-centered Program meets the communication objective mentioned above by employing a variety of pedagogically sound strategies. Currently, the Program serves over 800 undergraduate students enrolled at the main campus and approximately 40 students at AASU and GSU enrolled through the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program (GTREP).