Rudy Joenk, longtime member of the IEEE Professional Communication Society, passed away in Boulder, CO on 5 November 2018. Born in St. Louis, MO, he graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1953. After 21 months of active duty service in the US Army Ordnance Corps, he attended the University of … [Read more...]

Figure 1: Goleman's Emotional Competencies  Most would agree that emotional intelligence (EI) is essential to effectively managing and participating in teams, which is a key aspect of engineering work. Yet it’s not often taught in an engineering curriculum or discussed in the workplace. In her IEEE ProComm 2015 conference paper [1] and video … [Read more...]

Consider engineering as an act of translation, generating and applying different representations (words, models, equations, diagrams, etc.) to the practices of design and problem solving. The engineer perpetually moves between the world of theory and reality, and each step in between requires translation. As they design, they must also negotiate … [Read more...]

By Lydia Wilkinson Oral presentations can strike fear into the hearts of many an engineer. This discomfort is something all actors have had to deal with at some point, and that the discipline has developed strategies to address. Performers think of their body and voices as instruments that are used and manipulated to send particular messages to … [Read more...]

In her internationally best-selling book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, advises women to “speak your truth” but to do so in an appropriate, yet non-threatening way—to be “not brutally honest but delicately honest.” As one way maintain this delicate honesty, Sandberg provides some … [Read more...]