The Additive Advantage Podcast
In today’s volatile markets, organizations face a brutal balancing act: the relentless pressure to innovate faster while maintaining operational excellence. Additive manufacturing (AM) was supposed to be the game-changer. But for many companies, it’s become a slow burn of money, time, and credibility.
We’ve seen it up close: $4 million spent, 18 months passed, a dozen engineers assigned—and still no outcomes. Pilots stall. Production doesn’t scale. ROI never makes it to the P&L. If you’re a GM or SVP who championed AM and now find yourself watching money burn while results slip away—you’re not alone.
The truth? Most companies treat additive as a technical side project, handed to engineering and isolated from the business, with the expectation it will somehow deliver like magic. But innovation without execution is just expense.
That’s where the Additive Advantage Model comes in—and this podcast brings it to life.
Hosted by Shon Anderson and Dani Mason, with a combined 20 years of additive manufacturing experience, The Additive Advantage Podcast brings you real conversations with industry leaders who have been in the trenches of transformation. These aren’t fluffy tech chats—they’re straight-talk interviews about what it really takes to make additive deliver.
The Additive Advantage Podcast
EP 20: What If We Rethought Engineering Education?
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What if engineering education were designed around what engineers actually need to do in the real world?
In this episode of the workforce series, Shon Anderson sits down with Dr. Brian Tande, President of South Dakota Mines, to explore what engineering education could look like if we moved beyond traditional knowledge transfer and focused more on professional formation, experiential learning, and creating real-world value.
They discuss why students need opportunities to work on real problems before they graduate, how AI is changing the role of both engineers and universities, why technical knowledge alone is no longer enough, and how deeper partnerships between industry and academia could better prepare the next generation of engineers.
Dr. Tande also has a challenge for industry: bring universities real problems. South Dakota Mines is looking for industry partners willing to give students meaningful projects with real constraints, uncertainty, and opportunities to create value.
Interested in working with South Dakota Mines and bringing a real-world challenge to its students? Contact Dr. Brian Tande at president@sdsmt.edu
About the Show
The Additive Advantage Podcast explores what it really takes to turn additive manufacturing into a scalable, performance-driven business capability. Hosted by Dani Mason and Shon Anderson, the show features real conversations with leaders accountable for outcomes — not hype.
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About the Hosts
Hosted by Dani Mason and Shon Anderson, industry leaders with deep experience in technology and additive manufacturing.
I've heard and I'm sure you've heard you've probably said this yourself. Like we hire graduates from engineering, and then it takes a couple years to train them to actually do the job. And that, you know, feels like a personal failure on our part that we don't we're not producing graduates who are immediately ready to go and start creating value in in the real world. And that's why this focus on experiential learning, I think, is so important. Like by the time they graduate, they should know exactly what they're doing as an engineer and have perhaps a couple of years of real engineering experience before they graduate.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the Additive Advantage Podcast, where we explore the people, technology, and strategies shaping the future of manufacturing. I'm Danny Mason, and I'm here with my co-host, Sean Anderson. Whether you're leading an additive program, evaluating new technologies, or looking for practical ways to improve manufacturing outcomes, we're glad you're joining us.
SPEAKER_03Engineering education was built for a world where universities were the primary source of knowledge, but that's not the world we live in anymore. Today that information is everywhere. AI can answer technical questions on demand, and manufacturers don't just need graduates who know the equations. They need people who can identify the right problems to solve and then work through the uncertainty and collaborate with others and create value. So, what should engineering education look like now? Well, I sat down with Dr. Brian Tanney, who's the president of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, right here in Rapid City. We were able to do one of our first in-studio interviews, which was very cool. Um we sat down to talk about why he believes universities need to move beyond just this old paradigm of thinking they're there for the purpose of knowledge transfer and think more about professional transformation as their mission. Um he's a thought leader when it comes to innovation-based learning, deeper industry partnerships, and real world engineering work while students are in college. It was a great conversation about what engineering education needs to become and how industry can play a bigger role in guiding that so that the advanced manufacturing world has the engineers we need to achieve the potential of this technology. All right. Welcome to the additive advantage. I'm Sean Anderson, uh, one of your faithful hosts. And today I have the privilege of being joined by Dr. Brian Tandy, who's the president of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. And we're here to talk about the ever-present topic of workforce. Welcome to the additive advantage, President Tandy.
SPEAKER_01Great to be here.
SPEAKER_03Thanks for having me. You uh you bring a unique perspective to this topic of workforce, obviously uh currently leading one of the top science and engineering schools in the country. But do you want to share with our audience maybe a little bit about kind of your background and maybe your vision for how to tackle this workforce topic that might be a little different than what they're used to?
SPEAKER_01Sure. Happy to. So I've been at the School of Mines now about a year and a half. So I and I came from the University of North Dakota where I was the dean of the College of Engineering and Mines for about five and a half years. And prior to that, a faculty member and department chair in chemical engineering. So that's my background. And overall, about 20 years in higher ed. But prior to that, I worked in industry in the polymers and composites industry. And I think that industry experience has really shaped my, I guess, my philosophy in academia. And, you know, I've sure we'll get into this, but I see a lot of I want to say problems, but non-optimal design in how we deliver engineering programs. And so that's what I'm my vision for the university is just to be a lot more experiential and to help solve some of those issues that have persisted in higher ed and you know, may have been things that are fine in in the old way of doing things, but the world is rapidly changing and we need to be ready for it.
SPEAKER_03Well, as you mentioned, the world definitely is changing fast, and that maybe is a good place to start. Um, certainly in the world of advanced manufacturing, we like to think of this industry as a fast-moving, highly innovative place. And uh universities often move at a little bit different speed and operate with also a very different set of incentives. How do you create meaningful partnerships, you know, between industry partners and higher ed when both sides might be a little set in their ways and they have pretty different motivations? How do you how do you build those partnerships that might tell you what direction to take the universe?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's a challenge, to be honest. And the, you know, there's no shortage of failed attempts at partnering between universities and industries. I mean, the the timescales in which they operate are vastly different. And as you said, the the incentives are different. You know, the the best partnerships we have, I think, are they deep partnerships where it's not just between, say, the president or some other administrator and a leader in the company. It, you know, it's a partnership at all levels where you get faculty, staff, students involved and lots of different connections, lots of points of connection between the two organizations, rather than just something that's kind of top-down and driven that way. And really understanding what the problems are. It's one area where industry and academia don't necessarily see eye to eye in academics often, and not trying to be too critical, but they don't want to take the time to understand what the problems are in industry, you know, and oftentimes they want to do their work, the things that they are good at doing, without the mindset of I want to understand your problem and how I can help you solve your problem. You know, oftentimes it's I want to do my cool work, why don't you give me money to do that work? And it just needs a different, completely different approach.
SPEAKER_03Understood. One of the areas that I want to dive into right off the bat when you know we're talking about this difference between industry and education, you know, employers often talk about the need for obviously, yes, technical expertise, especially in a science and engineering realm uh where you're leading, but also this kind of soft skills side of things. You know, you've talked about the difference as you know, transferring knowledge versus professional formation. I've heard you use that phrase. And what does that distinction mean? And how, particularly in an engineering education environment, do you develop both?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and to your point, we are trying to move from just a mindset of, you know, our job is to transfer knowledge into the brain of the student to really developing competent professionals who can go out in the world and do important things and solve important problems. And so the knowledge transfer, of course, is still an important part of it, but it's it's insufficient. You know, a student really needs to go out and learn how to be a professional, you know, and that's not only being able to regurgitate technical knowledge that they might have learned in a class, but really being able to put that to use and understand what are the right problems to solve and how to communicate those and how to operate with a degree of uncertainty, which is something you don't see in the canned problems in a textbook, right? The world is a lot more complicated and there's a lot more uncertainty in all of the parameters of whatever problem you're trying to solve. And so the only way to really do that is through experience. So experiential learning come you know, combined with some level of reflection. So reflection is an important part of that, not only a student working on a project, but doing some kind of postmortem at the end of the project. And, you know, what did I learn in this? What did I do wrong? What could I have done better? Like that reflection is an important part of the overall process of forming a capable professional that's able to go out and do the important work that they're supposed to do.
SPEAKER_03You mentioned a couple of terms that I want to ask you to peel apart for us a little bit. One being experiential learning for folks like me who live in the industry side of things. We hear terms and we kind of nod like we know what that means, but usually we don't know what that means. Help help our audience a little bit with what you mean by that, specifically as it relates to kind of, you know, the technical side of higher ed and and workforce.
SPEAKER_01Sure. Yeah, I mean, the the contrast to experiential learning is traditional lectures, right? Something that we all had to endure back in the day. Sitting in a classroom, listening to somebody deliver technical content to you. You know, it nothing against it. It's it was effective, and obviously many capable engineers have come out of traditional academic programs. But I think that, you know, that content delivery mode is just becoming less and less relevant. You know, if you think back to how universities formed in the first place, why did they exist? Because that's where the knowledge was, that's where the the expertise was, and you had to go to a university to acquire that knowledge. No longer the case, right? Every, I mean, nearly every technical topic out there, you can find vast sources of that information. And you can acquire that knowledge in a variety of different ways. I mean, just go to YouTube and search for any topic, you're gonna find some expert able to convey that knowledge to you. So we have to go beyond that. And experiential learning is basically acquiring that knowledge but putting it to use in some type of project or some type of active learning experience. You know, learning by doing as opposed to learning by sitting and absorbing information. And so we thankfully, we on our campus, we have a long history of doing that. We are very hands-on campus, and that's part of our culture and has been for a very long time. And it seems obvious that that's the way that we should be moving. Not all universities actually agree with that. And I've been surprised by, for example, we just hired a new department head, and the program he's coming from essentially got rid of a lot of their lower division lab courses. And so he was tasked with uh their senior design class and finding that a lot of those students just weren't really prepared. You know, they they might have been really good at you know acquiring enough knowledge to regurgitate it on an exam or in their homework, but actually putting that to use in a real project, they they were lost. They hadn't done any of anything like that, even in a lab course. So thankfully, again, we we have a long history of doing that. And you know, our vision for the future is just to double down on those kind of hands-on learning opportunities.
SPEAKER_03Well, I also loved what you brought up about the importance of the reflection afterwards. So, you know, most people think experience is valuable. I had a had a mentor one time that said experience is worthless, evaluated experience is valuable. You know, doing it 10,000 times wrong, all you did was cement the muscle memory of how to continue doing it wrong. So, especially as it might relate to the soft skills, what like how does that practically come to life in this experiential learning environment that you're describing?
SPEAKER_01There's there's a number of models out there, and we're we're pursuing a few of them. Um, one is work-based learning or work-integrated learning. And I first learned about this when I visited a program in northern Minnesota called Iron Range Engineering. And in that program, they take students who have already completed an associate's degree and they come to their campus and they spend a semester doing, you know, learning about engineering design and learning professionalism and other things. Um, and then they're they have to find an internship. And so for the next two years, they work in an internship doing real engineering work. So there are requirements about what type of internship. They can't just be making coffee for somebody. They have to be doing real engineering work. And, you know, they're still connected with the campus, they're taking courses online from the campus, and then they're reporting back to their faculty about what they're learning. And the role of the faculty member in those cases is to be a coach, to be a mentor, and to do assessment of what the student is actually learning. So, in experiential learning, that the assessment of the student is something that needs to change. It's not just give somebody a test and then score the test and see how they did, if they passed or not. They have to really understand on an individual basis what is the student learning and how is their education progressing. So that's an interesting model where most of the time they're spent actually in the workplace. Another is innovation-based learning, which I helped launch a program that integrated that approach at my previous institution. And in that, it's it's a project-based education where students are working sometimes on their own ideas to develop a new technology, or sometimes with companies to help them develop a new idea or new technology. And the goal of that is to, or the requirement is that they create something of value. So it's value creation is an important part of it. So they're not just working on canned projects, you know, where you know the outcome is known. They're working on projects with uncertain outcomes, uncertain parameters, but creating value. That might be new knowledge, might be a new invention, might be a new product, a new company, something like that. And again, the assessment and the reflection of that experience is an important part of assessing whether the student is learning. And then so it's generally the types of things that we want to do. And it might look different in all of our different programs. Those are two different models. And so now though the people who founded those programs are now associated with South Dakota Mines because I want to bring that to our campus. But again, we're doing a lot of experiential learning already. And it, you know, it might look different in mechanical engineering than it looks in chemical engineering, but we're starting from a good stand, from a good place, and we just want to continue to grow that because that's in our opinion, that's how you really become an engineer by by doing engineering.
SPEAKER_03Well, and I think so you you brought up multiple topics that I want to go a little deeper on. One of them, I know as a as a high school kid who wanted to be a mechanical engineer, you know, I wanted to build things, work with my hands, do things. Um, the ratio of work with my hands, meaning take calculus notes versus actual the work with my hands that I had in mind wasn't quite what I'd hoped, especially in the you know the first couple of years. Um, but you know, you talk about faculty in that reflection or evaluation part, um, also coaching and mentoring them. One of the things that after I got out in the industry for a while seemed very strange to me about academia is in academia, usually professors are incentivized to, you know, research, publish, get grants. Um I didn't, you know, didn't ever hear of anyone like being incentivized to be the best teacher or mentor. And um, for someone who's wired like I am, that's a little more people-centric than task-centric, you know, one of the business principles I live by is if you can find out what somebody is gifted and talented to do and then get them in a role where they're doing that as much of the time as possible, you generally get the highest level of performance that person can give you. And it seemed like there were a lot of people who, you know, wanted to do the research, you know, want like that, that was their passion. They were in the field of, you know, whether it's mechanical, engineering, biotechnology, whatever it is, because that's their passion. And the teaching was kind of a oh, to get my lab time, I have to do this classroom time. How do you how do you deal with that? Or is there a a way forward that kind of better aligns people's passions with what they get required to do?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. It's a great question. We could probably talk about this for for three hours. Um, there is definitely a tension on, I would say, probably every campus that has research as part of their mission, a tension between those two parts, the teaching mission and the research mission. Um, you know, when I became uh an assistant professor in 2006. And at the time, what I was told was, you know, a professor had to be, you had to fit this particular model. You had to be good at teaching, you had to be good at research, you did some service for your department. And there was kind of, at least, you know, at that institution at that time, like one way of being a faculty member. You know, but after being a faculty member, being a department chair and hiring and evaluating faculty, you know, I think that is completely wrong. And for reasons that you that you already alluded to. You know, people are going to be more passionate about one versus the other. And you don't want to stifle it and force them to teach or force them to do research if that's not really where their passion is. So I see us and you know the the field in general kind of moving where we have more teaching specialists and more research specialists, because I think that just makes sense, as as you as you mentioned as well. Um, and so that means changing things like promotion and tenure and evaluation of faculty and just allowing them to play the to their strengths. There will be faculty, and I know faculty who are really great at both of those things, but I I think they're hard to find. And so those are the unicorns that exist, and we, you know, I'm I'm fortunate that we have a lot of those on our campus, but we also have people who probably would be better off if they were able to really focus and and be the best teacher that they can possibly be. And that still involves some research, potentially. They can do research and education, they can innovate, do new things in with their teaching if they're given the space to do that. And the same with research. You know, forcing a researcher to teach if that's not really their strength doesn't serve our students very well. So one of the things that really bugs me, and I've heard it for 20 years now that I've been in this industry, is when you talk to a student and they'll say something like, you know, Dr. X uh is a really good researcher, but not a very good teacher. And they have to endure a class from somebody who's really not passionate about teaching, it's a terrible thing. You know, we have you know we have these customers, they're they're paying a lot of money to be here, and they deserve our best. And so those kind of things bother me.
SPEAKER_03What you know, there are organizational challenges that are the same in a corporate environment as they are in in an academic environment. You know, when you think about creating roles where traditionally, though I've never been a professor, my guess is they tend to evaluate each other based on the quality of their research and the quantity of their grant money. And so the person who might really be the passionate teacher might tend to be seen as the bottom of the totem pole. Yeah. When in reality, there are, we need to see those as equally valuable and ways to demonstrate, you know, thought leadership and innovation. It it's maybe easier in the lab to quantify innovation than it is in the classroom. But the the students, you know, and I I had it wasn't, I got to compliment the school of mine. So a much higher percentage of my professors in the two years that I were there had been in industry, and you could tell almost from the minute he walked in the classroom. I graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington, who is more known for their graduate program than their undergrad, at least on the mechanical side. And there were definitely some professors that effectively communicated that I was not their primary objective. And uh yeah, it was it was challenging. Uh and I've it just seemed like, well, they're clearly not happy teaching this class, and I'm not very happy in this class. There's got to be a better way to do this, right? Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01Um I think you you mentioned faculty with industry experience. You know, we we need we need a mix. We need those who, you know, have really dive deep into a specific technical field and have a PhD and you know, can teach those advanced courses and do you know groundbreaking research. But we also need more people who have that industry experience. And like you said, we we're fortunate that we have quite a few, but I think we need to look at our how we recruit faculty and how we make those hiring decisions about what we really need, because those those faculty who have a lot of that real world experience are the ones who are going to have a much bigger impact on the student and their their eventual career and really be able to provide the the guidance and mentoring that that they need.
SPEAKER_03Well, and the other comment you made that is so refreshing, I think, to hear out of a university president's mouth is this focus on value creation as opposed to checking a box. And and I'm not at all, you know, we need a level of technical rigor and we need ways to demonstrate mastery and all those things. Things. But we also have to be because once you get in the workplace, it's all about value creation. And you know, getting to the finishing all 20 questions, just to finish all 20 questions doesn't get you a pat on the back anymore. How how is that a difficult concept to integrate into the higher ed environment? And how do you how do you maybe change hearts and minds around that? Or maybe changing hearts and minds isn't the battle. But what can you share with me about that as it relates to value creation?
SPEAKER_01I would say it is hard because most faculty and most students are used to the traditional way of education, you know, and the students we get are, you know, they they've learned how to play the game, I guess. You know, you go to class, you do the reading, maybe, you absorb enough information to do well on the exam and the homework. And that's, you know, they've optimized their learning around that system. And the same with most faculty, right? We've myself included. You know, I went as an undergrad and I went to get a PhD. I learned how to do that well, but that's a completely different thing than actually producing something of value to the world. And so it is a just a shift in the mindset of both the student and and the faculty member. And, you know, as we've developed more experiential learning and things like innovation-based learning, you know, we found that it is a tough adjustment for some students because they've they've optimized their their approach around what has worked in the past. And now you're asking them to shift gears and focus on something that's different, that's you know, more, more difficult in a lot of ways, that you know, you have to twist their brain about around the all the uncertainty and really understand problems in a different way than they were used to. And so it is an adjustment. And and on the faculty side, you know, you've you know how you were taught to, you know, in calculus or thermodynamics or engineering design or whatever. And that's naturally how you want to teach your students. So getting them to think about things like value creation is, you know, it it takes some investment in faculty development. We're part of a network called the the Keen Network, and that's all about developing the entrepreneurial mindset within students, and they define that by based on what they call the three C's curiosity, connections, and creating value. And so they offer a lot of faculty development workshops to get faculty to think about these things and how to incorporate them into their courses. And so, you know, to make this transition across an entire university, it it takes some time and a lot of work on the part of the university and especially the faculty to start thinking about how they can structure their courses differently.
SPEAKER_03Well, I want to connect a couple of points. So, because I've I've been one of these people that talks about, you know, well, we need graduates with soft skills. I think that twisting of the mind that you just referenced is the door opener to soft skills. Because to me, soft skills are purely being able to see the world from somebody's perspective other than yours, whether that's how much you talk, when you talk, how you dress, it's just can you see the world through anyone else's eyes? And that concept of, you know, what value is being created here? Well, I don't know. I just want the A.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Or, you know, if you were me, I just want to pass. Uh that's a great way to begin to open up some thought process, thought processes to what I think most employers call soft skills. Um, but that, you know, challenging the students that the way you've always thought about this and what always got you the pat on the back in the past, that's gonna change the minute you exit this campus. So you need to start grasping it now is so powerful.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I agree. I mean, I've I've heard, and I'm sure you've heard you've probably said this yourself. Like we hired graduates from engineering, and then it takes a couple of years to train them to actually do the job. And that, you know, feels like a personal failure on our part that we don't we're not producing graduates who are immediately ready to go and start creating value in in the real world. And and that's why this focus on experiential learning, I think, is so important. Like by the time they graduate, they should know exactly what they're doing as an engineer and have perhaps a couple of years of real engineering experience before they graduate.
SPEAKER_03I think that's fantastic. Shifting gears a little bit more into the manufacturing context. Um, you know, that everybody's heard of, you know, micro and dirty jobs and all this stuff. And there, I think there's a a general opinion that there's declining interest in manufacturing careers. Um, yet, you know, I'm hearing you say, no, our students come and they're they're hands-on hungry to build things. Um what do you see from today's students and what excites them about engineering? And then how does industry connect to that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, good question. You know, thinking about when I was a kid, um, you know, I liked math and science, and teachers and counselors, you know, naturally say, oh, you should go into engineering. I just kind of always thought, yeah, I'm gonna go into engineering. I had absolutely no idea what engineering was. I can relate to that. None whatsoever. There were, and where I grew up in northwest North Dakota, there really weren't that many engineers around. Um, I met a few, you know, visited like power plants and things like that. There's a lot more now with all the oil activity up there. But but honestly, I'd had no idea what it was. I think things are a lot better now. There's a lot more opportunities. There's, you know, high school courses, programs like Project Lead the Way, competitive robotics teams. There's a it's a lot more opportunities for students to to get involved in engineering or engineering-related activities and know more about what it is and more get more experience, you know, designing and building things. And some of the high school students that I see in competitive robotics are amazing. I mean, you would you would want to hire them right out of high school because they've already been doing engineering. And so that that's been a real positive thing. I think there's still a lot of students who, you know, maybe they see that as, you know, that's what the nerdy kids do or something like that. So there's probably some who need a little bit more exposure to it. But there's a wealth of opportunities for students, you know, especially in larger schools that have more of those kind of activities. And increasingly, even at smaller schools, you're seeing more teams related to robotics, especially. Um, I think we need to do a better job of finding other ways to reach students who maybe maybe robotics isn't really their thing, but there's other engineering-related activities that they might want to be interested in, because there's, you know, obviously so many different fields of engineering to get into. Like I think what are the future chemical engineers of the world doing in high school? You know, I didn't have anything related to chemical engineering. I don't even know why I chose it other than I seem to like chemistry more than most people did. So um, but yeah, so they're the especially the kinds of students that we attract seem to be the ones who are hands-on. They are eager to get in the lab, design, and build things. You know, I I think I've told you once that I had some a group of students come to my office because they were worried about the hours of the lab shrinking a little bit, and that they were up in arms about it because they wanted to spend as much time in the lab and the shop as they possibly could. So, you know, and and so I think that that is a definitely a positive thing. Um, you know, a lot of students like who grew up in rural areas like me, that there's not a lot of manufacturing around, and maybe they have, you know, a certain impression of what manufacturing is, you know, maybe old school thoughts about assembly line manufacturing that maybe doesn't appeal to them. So we probably need to do a better job of getting students out to facilities like yours and seeing that, oh, manufacturing is actually really cool, really high-tech. There's a lot of different ways to get involved. I mean, you're hiring software engineers, mechanical engineers, probably some chemical engineers, perhaps. I mean, or chemists, and I mean, there's just a lot of great things going on in manufacturing, and the more that we can get students exposed to that, the better.
SPEAKER_03You know, one of the things that I think um, and it it's an educational lift, but so many people still think of manufacturing as something feeds in a raw thing, some hydraulic rams slam two metal plates together, you try not to get your hand caught in it and then a part falls out because that's what you see in the cartoons, right? Um, and today it is all data and software driven and systems integration and and you know, systems management. So whether you are on the mechanical side, the software side, I mean, you name it, the industrial kind of ergonomic process flow side, you know, the factory of today, the folks that are the, again, the goo comes in, metal plates slammed together, part falls down, they're not, they're not in business anymore. Right. Um, so my encouragement would be you know, the uh factory is much more than a material handling exercise today. It's all data and software and controls and uh process optimization to a higher degree. You know, I had an internship when I was in college at a company that was in the fiber optic telecommunications space, which back then would be like having an internship at Meta or something today. I mean, fiber optics was the cool thing. Um and you know, it was basically injection molding. Um, you know, you go into a factory today, when I go to visit some of our customers, I mean, you need you need a lot of engineers just to keep that factory running. Again, the software, data, control systems, process optimization, and all the integration between supply chain, purchasing, finance. Um I feel like the opposite, there are so many opportunities. You know, it wasn't, well, we have one plant engineer. Right. Um, you know, those those folks are, I don't think those there's many of those businesses left.
SPEAKER_01Right. Yeah, and there's everything is so much more technical than it used to be. And one of my favorite things is getting alumni to come back and, you know, three, five, ten years out of school and come back and talk to to students about their experience. And I it really have and then never forget one former student of mine, chemical engineer, who went to work in a at a corn mill. Okay. And like I'm I'm sure growing up, she never dreamed that she'd go work in a corn mill. But she came back to talk to her students and was just totally nerding out on corn milling, like all every technical aspect of corn milling and you know, the the production, the process, the control, the data, as you mentioned, and like, and it just reminded me like everything is very technical, and there's something for people to dive into, no matter what your interests are, you're gonna find something in manufacturing that you think is really fun to work on and and really cool. And so we just need to get that message out to young people more that there's whatever your interests are, there are really great opportunities in manufacturing.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. And and it's you know, it's as we've both mentioned, it's not just, oh, well, if I'm not mechanical or industrial, I probably don't have a job there. No, if you're software, if you're, you know, a hardware engineer. I mean, it's you can't have a factory without electronics and software and controls anymore. Um, you know, we probably just like we can't do one of these podcasts without the word workforce coming up, I probably can't have a university president in here and not ask about AI. You you probably get fatigued with that question. But um obviously AI is changing the workplace. I can only imagine it's changing the educational space as well. What is the university that is working to be prepared not only to thrive in the world of tomorrow, but meet the needs of students and industry in the world of tomorrow? Where does AI fit into what the university is doing?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, we're we're all about integrating AI into everything we do and everything our students do because it's it's not going away. There are faculty and uh at other universities and other universities that that want to restrict the use of AI, but I think it's that's the wrong approach. You know, AI is gonna be a partner in the work that engineers and scientists do, and we might as well start training them in that that same way while they're students. And so, you know, it AI is gonna change, like you said, the the workplace. It's gonna change the type of work that engineers do, um, and it's gonna change education. It already has. And I think this this whole move on the part of our university to to double down on experiential learning is to a large extent in response to AI, because you know, the old content delivery model just doesn't work anymore. And you can have AI as an expert in most fields. And yeah, they're gonna get some things wrong, they're gonna hallucinate, but you know, it's an on-demand source of information. AI tutors exist, they're gonna only get better and better. So what we have to focus on, you know, creating value. What are what is the value that we provide as a university in the age of AI? And that's the experience. Like you still can't duplicate what universities have any other way. There's no other place where you bring together so many smart, motivated young people with experts among the faculty and people who really care about their development and formation into one place. And, you know, it's magic happens in environments like that. And so that that really is the value. It's the experiential learning and just the the opportunity to try new things and and fail sometimes and learn from those. And so AI is really just driving that transition, I think. And universities like ours are small enough, agile enough, that I think we can make that transition a lot faster than the some of the large behemoths out there. So it is changing the world. And I think it's changing, you know, the way that we need to approach how we assess students, as we've talked about. It's it's got to be more, you know, individual assessment of what our students are actually learning. They have to demonstrate what they're capable of. It's not just about test, homework, and quizzes anymore. It's about projects completed, a portfolio of things that they can demonstrate that they, that they know. And the role of the engineer with AI is to do more of the the validation and verification. You know, you still need humans to make sure that you're you're asking the right questions, right? AI can solve a lot of problems, but are they solving the right problems? That's it's the job of the human to figure out what is the right problem to be solved and to make decisions about you know ethics and you know, to be the person who's responsible. Like an AI can't be responsible for a decision and a about a design that might have impact on humans, right? Somebody, a person has to be responsible for that. So, you know, what what I think has been interesting is it really has highlighted the importance of those non-technical skills. And, you know, I've come honestly, I've come full circle on the value of arts and humanities and social sciences. I mean, when I was think back to when I was a student, those were just extra classes the university forces you to take. I think now that's a big part of the value of being an engineer is understanding that stuff, the human side of things. You know, what how do people work, right? How do they communicate with one another? What brings people joy and satisfaction? Like you have to understand humans if your job is to solve problems for humans. And I think AI is really highlighting that as well.
SPEAKER_03Well, you're saying some pretty revolutionary things for uh a guy that leads a science and engineering university.
SPEAKER_01Um full circle in that from being annoyed to have by having to take these classes to now saying that really is an important part of your formation of uh being an engineer.
SPEAKER_03Well, and I think learning to think in an environment, you know, in high school, one of the reasons I thought math and science were easy was there was an answer. And one of the things that drove me nuts about English is it's like, well, just tell me how to write a good poem and I'll write a good poem. Yeah. Well, you know, it's kind of like riding a bike. I can't exactly, I can sort of tell you, but I can't exactly tell you. And that was, you know, when I was younger, it that was frustrating me. It's like, ah, give me a problem where there's an answer, and I either get the right answer or I don't. But the world just doesn't work that way. And when you introduce, you know, and I one of the things that AI, um, you know, even if it solves the problem perfectly, how much context did it have? And humans have to decide, you know, how much context does it need to come up with a solution to this problem. Uh, these are all things that you know, the human is so necessary for, and the relational component of what we do. Um, it's it's interesting to me. I would bet anyone who ever went to college or high school or community college, what everybody has been lonely at some point. All humans have some relational needs. I managed to get through five years of engineering school without really any discussion of that. Doesn't mean I didn't hang out with my friends and have fun and all that good stuff, but there wasn't a, you know, these are, I think, some of the things you're pointing to in the humanities and fine arts that are human parts of the human condition that simply knowing how to, you know, run the Navier-Stokes equation in fluids doesn't equip me to deal with. Right. Um I wanna, I wanna pick up on something else you shared with me one time. You said uh it might be time to rethink how we teach mathematics. Uh, as somebody who took Calc two twice, I'm open to this idea. And that's I I find that to be a pretty bold statement. What do you think needs to change in something that fundamental? And how do you balance that academic rigor against, you know, making engineering more accessible and relevant to where the world is today?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, math is has been, you know, it's often considered a weed out class, calculus in in engineering programs. And over my career, I can't even count the number of people who, when I tell them I'm an engineering professor or whatever, they'll say, Oh, yeah, I started in engineering and then I couldn't get past calc two or calc three. And there are many, many of them I've gotten to know, like they would have been fantastic engineers, but they couldn't get past that. So there's definitely a problem. I mean, and if you look at DFW rates, so rates of number of percentages of students that get either a D, an F, or withdraw from the class, it's incredibly high. And it's not acceptable to me, or it shouldn't be acceptable to anybody. And you can, you know, there's plenty of factors that go into that. You know, are students coming in prepared? Or are they getting the right type of education before they get to our campus? And, you know, there, so there are a lot of factors that we don't control. But I think it's it's safe to say there are other potentially other ways of doing things. You know, a lot of math classes are taught the same way that they were taught in 1950. And so there are a number of ideas out there, and I want to be able to kind of explore those and find other ways of doing it. Um for example, um, the American Society for Engineering Education has advocated for kind of breaking up the calculus sequence into smaller chunks, I guess, and teaching them kind of in context or in demand. So as you're learning physics, like you're learning how to do a derivative or something as part of learning Newton's laws, things like that. That makes a little more sense. You know, and you know, I took a differential equations class, I passed it, had no idea what differential equations were for until I got to classes like fluid mechanics and reactor design, where you're solving systems of differential equations. Oh, no, now it makes sense. Maybe I should have learned how to do differential equations as part of that, where it would just have made a lot more sense from the beginning, yeah, other than rather than taking it in this class out of context and then having to kind of learn it all again because that none of it really stuck the first time. So our approach is just going to be to start innovating, trying new ways of doing this, seeing what works. Some things won't work any better, so we'll discard those, but that's that's our approach. And I think you know, our our students will benefit from just being part of uh More innovative ways of teaching math. And I'm not being critical of our math faculty because I think they're they're fantastic and they're doing a great job. I just I want to explore other ways of doing it and see if we can find a better way.
SPEAKER_03Love that. Well, I've I've had you on the hot seat talking about the world of education. Uh, you brought up early on the importance of looking to understand what problems we could solve for others. What do you need more of or differently from industry today to help you guide the ship well as the leader? And also, you know, what are the challenges that you see from the other side of the fence, so to speak, um, that you think industry maybe needs to get on top of in its own, in its own realm?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I think academia and industry are still too far apart from one another. And this is just, you know, decades of how things have evolved over time. You know, there's still this separation. You know, sure, we have connection points. Like, for example, students go out and do internships or co-ops and then they come back to campus. Or there sometimes we'll have industry-sponsored projects that they work on. Um, and other, you know, we have industry advisory boards that give us feedback every once in a while. But I still think there's a lot more that we can do together. And as we've developed our new strategic plan, which we'll be launching over the course of the fall, we've come up with this phrase, which hopefully makes sense to people, that we want to we want to treat our industry partners as academic infrastructure. So part of our academic infrastructure is those industry partners that are that we want to be partners in the process of educating engineers and scientists at a deeper level than these scattered touch points that we have currently. Um I think there's there's models for that already. Um, you know, I've talked about work-integrated learning. If as we grow that, those are much deeper partnerships with with employers. And so I guess to answer your question, just asking folks in industry to to maybe be open to thinking about that academic industry relationship in in a different way. You know, we've created this model over time where you know we're seen as you know, maybe the source of engineers, but you know, that's still a a non-optimal model. If we can kind of co-create the next generation of engineers, that's kind of what we're we're after. And I know they're busy. You know, folks in industry have have their obviously have a lot of constraints and you know, they're have to make a profit, they have to ship the next product, et cetera, et cetera. So we're not asking them to do work for us, but we got to figure out new ways of of working together. And I look at like the the healthcare industry, for example. Like there's there are things like teaching hospitals that are designed to help train healthcare providers, you know, and students naturally go out and do more internships, and that's part of the learning process. You know, my my wife is uh a dietitian. She used to be the chair of of nutrition and dietetics at UND, and they have a required internship as part of their program. And and they hire folks to be, they call them preceptors out working in clinics who are they're part of the educational process of you know, mentoring and assessing the learning of those students. I think there are things like that that we can do as well. And we're looking at, you know, apprenticeship programs and all kinds of new models that really help integrate academia and industry.
SPEAKER_03So are there, I guess, where do you get the opportunity to go interact with, you know, your your peers in the industry world to kind of have that, you know, executive level strategy session and knock some ideas around about you know that can trickle down and and make a tangible difference? Are are there ample opportunities to do that? I guess maybe is a the question I should have asked first. And then how do we, you know, in my experience, being a part of a very large company was at when I was at Schneider Electric and now, you know, here at B9, and I hear you say, hey, we're rolling out our new strategic plan. In my mind, it isn't that the work gets done top down, but if it doesn't get prioritized at that level, the energy and resources to do the work don't persist. And so, you know, in my mind, getting those conversations happening so that there is a slide in the strategic plan deck around this is key. How how does that come to be, or is that coming to pass, or is that something that we need more of?
SPEAKER_01I think, I think it exists and there could definitely be more. I mean, I've I've spent, like I said, I've been here a year and a half, I've spent a lot of time doing tours and visits at companies and really being able to sit down and and ask folks like, what is it, how are we doing as a university? How is the product that we're producing working for you? What can we do better? And trying to understand what their biggest problems and constraints are. Um but yeah, and I enjoy doing that. And I've I'd love to be able to spend more time doing that. And I think we could probably find more ways for our faculty to do that. And we and we've started doing more of that. Like we brought a bunch of uh faculty and students out to Sioux Falls and we visited uh a few manufacturers out there, and those kind of things really help spur a lot of you know, discussions that lead to common understanding between academia and industry. And I think we should try to do more of those types of things.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I found the old, you know, the phrase that you know, your grandfather or father, or somebody probably, but the other the old walk a mile in somebody else's shoes. Uh, the best way to help a deeply technical but stubborn engineer, you know, open his eyes is to go send him out to a customer site and make him spend a day in a room with customers, you know, fielding questions about why the product doesn't do this or doesn't do that, or why is this so complicated. And um, you know, it's a a revelation experience, I think. And we all need to do that. I think those of us in industry frequently don't appreciate it's easy. I mean, it's easy in any place to just sit back and gripe. And uh, Matt Kirchner and I, we had a great conversation about, you know, not being thought leaders, but being action leaders. And so this concept of, you know, we can have a podcast and say whatever we want to say and then just go back to our office and do things the way we always did. Um, you know, what what's something practical and tactical that you that you are uh, I guess would challenge industry leaders to, you know, if they're watching this, whether they're a plant manager or director of engineering or you know, additive manufacturing engineer, what can they go back tomorrow and do differently that'll help you, the students, and their organizations all succeed together?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think with the direction that we're going with really increasing the amount of experiential learning and hands-on projects, we really need real projects for our students to work on. And so the more that that they can bring us real problems that that our students and our faculty can can dig into, the better off we're gonna be as a university and the better off the the students will be having to work on those real problems with real real constraints and the real level of uncertainty. So that that would be the one thing I would point to is you know, we're with the direction we're going, we're gonna need a lot more of those kind of projects. And and they usually come with some commitment on the part of the the sponsor to to help, you know, work with the students a bit, you know, as a kind of a technical advisor. Because it's not like they're just gonna throw us a problem and we're gonna work on it for a few months and come back with a solution. It has to be an interactive, you know, incremental process that that requires both parties to have a commitment to it.
SPEAKER_03I like that a lot. Um, I guess last question, as you think, you know, you're embarking on some pretty significant, significant changes. If you look ahead 10 years, how would you describe the future of engineering education? What does that look like? And how will you know that you've succeeded in terms of the vision that you've got and the changes you're trying to make?
SPEAKER_01Well, let me I'll ask the yours, or I'll answer your second question first. So I mentioned this thing that you hear where, yeah, we hire engineering graduates, but then it takes them a couple of years to to really get up to speed. Or, you know, the analog to that is I hear from students like everything I really needed to know, I learned in my internship. And I didn't, you know, I didn't really use what I learned in my classes. I'll know we succeeded when you never hear those things from our students or from our employers, because our students are, you know, coming out of our program with already a couple of years of real engineering experience, and our programs are really deeply integrated with what those students are going to be doing and what real engineering practice looks like. Um, beyond that, I think you know, having a lot more flexibility. I think, you know, right now we have a lot of traditional students that come in when they're 18, they leave when they're 22, 23, um, having a lot more entry points and being able to accommodate a lot more students who are in different situations in their lives. You know, a lot of them feel like, oh, I I didn't take the right classes in high school, so I guess I'll never be an engineer. Like we we need to be a bit more, I guess, accessible for students and not only young students, but even working adults who want to come back and finish a bachelor's degree. So we're really working on designing programs that offer a lot more flexibility in that way as well.
SPEAKER_03Well, this has been an engaging conversation. I'm excited about the direction that you're taking the school of minds. And I think, you know, as someone who you know leads a company in the advanced manufacturing space, you know, more graduates with more hands-on experience and not only hands-on the technology, but hands-on the relational elements of working in project teams, dealing with setbacks, everything not being confined to a you know, one semester uh and having to solve for more than one variable at a time. I'm excited about where you're headed.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Glad to hear that. It's been a really fun conversation. Thank you. Well, thank you, President Tandy.
SPEAKER_00One of these themes that you just brought up, I want to dig into this, moving beyond engineering education to professional formation, not just a knowledge transfer exercise. From the employer side, how do you think about someone who knows engineering and someone who knows how to be an effective engineer?
SPEAKER_03Great question. Um, you know, and President Tandy touched on it when he said, you know, it's not just the how do I solve the technical problem, but it's how do I fit into this group on this project? Am I the you know, young, inexperienced engineer and I really need to be looking to learn? Am I the SME subject matter expert? And so I need to be bringing these things you know actively out. He talked about you know, the role of professors changing from just I get up and I deliver this lecture and I write a bunch of equations on the board to I'm watching these students perform in context and then I'm giving feedback about not just did you run the equation right, but how did you interact in that team, et cetera. Similar to that, I mean, as a as a business leader, I need people who can plug in. You know, you and I have talked about many times, there's very few things that get done in B9 Creations by one person, very few customer problems that get solved by one person. So you've got to be effective in a team, which sounds cliche, but I use the word effective instead of just functional because it isn't just do your part, it's make the team perform better. And we could do a whole conversation around you know, the pyramid of constructive relationships and those other frameworks that we use to optimize for that. But I love it when I hear a university president talking about those things and talking about evaluated experience for students in real world, you know, innovation-based or experiential learning. If they'll start working on that in college, we won't have to start from square one when they get here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I think that's a great point. You know, kind of a corollary to that in terms of seeing how they work in context is when President Tandy talked about, yes, we have AI that can get better at technical work, but that makes human judgment, context, communication, humanities more important for engineers. How do you think about that? Again, maybe from the business leader side.
SPEAKER_03You know, it's pretty cool. Um, and for any of our listeners out there who aren't engineers or technical professionals by education, when you hear the president of a science and engineering college who was a chemical engineer, you know, worked in industry, taught chemical engineering, was a dean of engineering, talking about the importance of the humanities, um, that should, you know, for all you English majors out there, that should make your heart flutter a little bit. Um again, in the in the work context, we need better rounded people because it used to be you had to be, you know, able to find the answer. And if you were good enough at this, sometimes people would kind of overlook the fact that you're a little, I'm gonna use the word clunky in an interpersonal uh environment. Well, this find the technical answer is becoming worth less and less. Um and I don't say that to scare anyone, but when I can go to Grok or Claude or wherever, and I can get access to you know every engineering textbook that was ever written, well, that is less valuable. Now it's how do you bring it in a way that understands what is the critical path item on this project and how do we align that with what the customer's trying to accomplish? You've got to have a little broader business understanding, certainly broader people understanding. Because just standing up and saying, Eureka, I found the answer. You know, five years from today, I'm not I think as long as it's to the right problem or right question, I think the answer itself will be worth it, if not a lot.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. I I want to delve a little deeper into that idea of problem. You know, his when you think about President Tandy's ask of industry, it was bring us real problems for students to solve. So if there's a business leader executive listening on this and wants to take him up on that challenge, what do you think makes a good industry project for students? And what would you tell those companies to do next with that challenge?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think, you know, because we've tried to do this at B9 Creations in my previous life at Schneider Electric, uh, we tried to do this. One of the challenges has always been the obviously semester-oriented cadence of the education world. And so you're like, oh, well, you want a real world problem, but it's kind of like a sitcom. We want a real world problem that entertains people and could be solved in 30 minutes, right? Except in this case, it's a semester. So I think finding ways, but what I hear from President Tandy, I get excited because I what I think I'm hearing him say is we're gonna run more project-based things that could carry on, you know, potentially past a semester. I think if we can break the semester barrier where, you know, if there's a mechanics of materials class and I bring them a problem from industry, well, I have this team of students, but then at the end of that semester, they all go their separate ways. If some of the credit is based on this innovation-based learning that might not, you know, it might be a two semester class, oh my gosh, that opens up the window now to a whole lot more real world problems. You know, my experience has been if you if you choose, you know, it's like if it's gotta be a sitcom and resolve in 30 minutes, well, it has to be either a really simple life crisis or you know, something kind of made up. Right. If in the corporate world or or technical, you know, technology company world, most of the stuff that you could solve in six weeks, by the time I'd go explain it to a class of engineering students, you know, the team would already be done. And that's not the level of challenge that I think when I hear him talk about innovation-based learning, he wants them working on real problems. And for those of you who are following this workforce series, I can't wait till the next episode where we're gonna hear from a K through 12 thought leader. And when you hear her perspective on I'm gonna use the word experiential learning because I don't want to steal the phrase you're gonna hear from her, but this we've got to give them problems that are meaningful and that have a reward. We heard, you know, President Tandy use the phrase value creation, another hugely important concept that if you can get these students at the university stage thinking about what's the value I'm creating here? Again, not got the right answer. Great. What value does that answer create? Or what do we have to put around that answer to create the value? Is it, hey, I solved this software bug? How many customers run the firmware that that bug is in? How do I deploy? You know, is this a like I gotta get everybody to upgrade? Is this you know, what do I have to put around that answer? And who do I have to collaborate with? Obviously, that was totally hypothetical. We've never worked on that for me. Um but who do I have to collaborate with to unlock the value for the end customer? Oh my gosh, if we can get, you know, graduates who've been thinking about that for three years by the time they come here, that that is probably the greatest unlock for any business leader.
SPEAKER_00Love it. What an incredible conversation.
SPEAKER_03Huge thanks to President Brian Tandy from the School of Minds. Um, also, I greatly admire his courage because he's gonna open it up to all of you. If you are an industry leader and you're looking to be a part of this revolution in innovation-based learning, if you will reach out to President Tandy, he would love to talk to you about how he can get some of America's best and brightest science and engineering students working on real business problems for you. We're gonna put his email address in the show notes. Um I know he'd love to hear from you. I gotta say, I've talked to a lot of university presidents over the years, and he's one of the few that actually got my heart beating a little faster. Um and I I I love where he's headed. I hope other institutions will follow.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. And thanks again to you all for joining us for this episode of the Additive Advantage Podcast. If you enjoyed today's conversation, follow the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, subscribe on YouTube, and connect with us on LinkedIn so you never miss a new episode. Until next time, keep building, keep learning, and keep finding your additive advantage.
