FACULTY PROFILE

TheFixer

In her passion for engineering, Rebecca Bates works the human angle

By Joe Tougas ‘86

By any measure, Rebecca Bates has admirable motivations for her life in engineering education, among them fostering social justice and serving humanity. But her very first motivation, she said, was needing to change the channels on the family television. In a memorable childhood moment, Bates discovered her younger siblings had flushed the set’s knobs down the toilet. She surveyed the situation, applied some pint-sized real-word thinking to the situation and clamped a pair of pliers on the TV’s spindle to create a makeshift knob. A television emergency was handled, the channels became changeable again and, for Bates, a lifelong attraction began toward the art and science of solving problems. “Adjusting things, fixing things, knowing I could fix things, knowing I could make things work that didn’t necessarily work was always kind of part of my identity,” Bates said from her faculty office, itself a study in stacks and multi-tasking. “I did not know that kind of problem solving was what engineers do.”

In her 20 years at the University, Rebecca Bates has guided the Iron Range and Twin Cities engineering programs to their acclaimed statewide status and today is chair of the Integrated Engineering department.

She now chairs the Integrated Engineering department at Minnesota State Mankato, where she’s guided engineering education into state and national acclaim for the past 20 years. In guiding and preparing generations of problems solvers, she also encourages values that are people-oriented and long-term. “We really work to help students think about ‘What’s the whole context here? Why are you doing this?’” she said. “Some of it’s just exciting, like ‘Can I make this plane fly?’ That’s a cool thing. … But then, what’s the context? What are the emissions of that plane going to be, and is that going to affect the passengers in ways where it would be better for us to take a slower path as opposed to a superfast path? “Thinking about the context and the impact of our engineering designs is something I want all of our students and graduates to be able to think about.”

A WIDE RANGE

At her high school, Bates was stellar at math and science and also loved the arts. She recalls reading in the mid-1980sa story in Discover magazine about the artificial heart being developed and used for the first time. Such use of technology to improve humanity moved her, guiding her college and graduate studies and her career at Minnesota State Mankato. Bates came to Minnesota State Mankato after graduating from Boston University and, later, the University of Washington where she obtained a doctorate in electrical engineering. In her time at Minnesota State Mankato, Bates guided establishment of the Iron Range Engineering program and helped create the Twin Cities Engineering and Bell Engineering programs. In its current implementation, Bell Engineering brings engineering students from across the country to the Iron Range for one semester developing professional and technical skills needed to be successful. They then find co-op work with engineering companies around the country (usually in the student’s home area) where they work by day at the job and take IRE courses online at night for two years. By the time they graduate with their bachelor’s degree, they have two years of work experience and are often offered full-time jobs before graduating as a result. Bates is proud that the reach of the programs is so wide. “The scope of who we reach as a university has expanded to not just the entire state of Minnesota but, through this co-op program, we really have a national reach.” Bates was recently awarded a rare fellowship into the American Society for Engineering Education. The recognition noted both programs as well as “her research work examining community and belonging in STEM education, her work to support diversity in the field of engineering and her service to the American Society for Engineering Education and engineering education community.” The emphasis she puts on the Bigger Picture when it comes to engineering covers a lot. It’s also why she came here. “The fact that this is a state university that is economical for Minnesotans to attend really became part of it,” she said. “Becoming an engineer for many people for many years has been a step into the middle class from poverty. … Having well-developed pathways that go from community colleges to a bachelor’s degree is something I see as really meeting a social justice need.” Colleagues in both the Twin Cities and Iron Range programs say Bates has an equal passion for harmony closer to home.

The idea of prioritizing inclusion, diversity and sustainability into engineering varies, said Twin Cities Engineering professor Robert Sleezer, noting that Bates has routinely infused her approach with such values for all of the 12 years he’s known her. “Every engineer does it to some level,” Sleezer said. “She is at least three if not six standard deviations out.”