////////////
FEATURE BY CHRIS JENKINS
LEARNING TO LEAD Traveling halfway across the country to spend the day with a team leader and sitting in a high-level NASA project strategy meeting could have been an intimidating experience for an undergraduate engineering student. Instead of feeling lost, though, Jessica Willard walked away with confidence:
I can do this.
“I was honestly so blown away by how much of what I have learned at Marquette helped me understand these meetings,” she says. “It made me feel like I could participate in this meeting. It was really cool.” As a junior in the Opus College of Engineering’s E-Lead program, Willard traveled to Pasadena, Calif., to spend a day shadowing Katie Weiss, Eng ’01, a senior flight software engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
During her junior year, Jessica Willard traveled to Pasadena, Calif., to spend a day learning leadership lessons from Katie Weiss, Eng ’01, a senior flight software engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Shadowing Marquette alumni who are industry leaders in the field of engineering is one of the key components of E-Lead, a program combining courses and real-world experiences to help students develop leadership expertise to complement the traditional technical side of an engineering education. The idea is to give students a taste of what it takes to lead a team, inspire value-focused innovation and get them thinking about everything they’ll need to do to become a team leader themselves someday — and succeed at it when they get there. “They see the interaction we have in a collaborative engineering environment,” Weiss says. “It was really good for them to see that. Because one of the things you don’t really get exposure to as a student is: What do engineers actually do on a day-to-day basis? They got to see what it is we really do and that it is a team effort.” Students apply to the three-year E-Lead program early in their sophomore year; about 20 new students are accepted every year. The application process includes an essay in which students describe their leadership aspirations and discuss a leadership philosophy, theory, skill, trait or behavior that they would like to explore further. A selection committee of industry leaders, faculty and staff selects qualified candidates and invites them for individual interviews.
14 // 2015