(266c) Preparing Students for Professional Success: Cross-Disciplinary Lessons

An important objective for many disciplines at academic institutions is to impart students with the specific skills and viewpoints needed to succeed in their chosen profession. Each discipline has carefully considered how their courses can best prepare students for professional life and has come up with strategies for ensuring their students practice the necessary skills. While in some cases the techniques used by a particular discipline are unique to that discipline, it is likely that there are commonalities between the approaches. It may be possible for educators in chemical engineering, for example, to learn from faculty in journalism on how to prepare students for the professional world. In this project, a survey was sent to faculty in 46 different departments at Kansas State University to evaluate how they taught students the skills they would need in their professional life. In addition, 33 different classes were visited, representing 23 different academic departments. This presentation will describe both quantitative and qualitative results on the ways in which faculty impart the skills their students need to succeed as professionals. Both commonalities and differences will be described, with specific attention to unique ways of training students that may be transferable between disciplines.