iEFX--designing a new experience for first-year Engineering students

Just as it had hoped to do when it began in 2007, iFoundry is continuing to cultivate change within the College of Engineering curriculum. After being available to a limited number of students in previous years, the Illinois Engineering First-year Experience (iEFX) has now been opened to all first-year students in the College of Engineering, changing the way incoming students are introduced to engineering on campus.

“What happened really surprised us,” iFoundry associate director Karen Hyman said of the iEFX programs, which began in 2009. “From the small changes in the curriculum and the student experience, there was a really positive response from the students, and they were doing all kinds of neat projects that you really wouldn’t expect students in their first year to do early on.”

Prior to the change, first-year engineering students took an eight-week introductory course (ENG 100) that introduces students to the profession of engineering while easing the transition to the Engineering at Illinois.

The class has now been condensed to four weeks, with the course having an added emphasis on encouraging students to become involved in the student life on campus.

Following the four-week class, first-year students are encouraged to take one of seven continuation courses that are aimed to give students a hands-on, project-based experience. Topics include Engineering at Illinois, International Dimensions of Engineering, Aspirations to Leadership, Freshman Undergrad Research Seminar, Renaissance Engineer, Mentoring for Freshman Women, and iefx Projects.

The pilot project initially admitted 77 first-year engineering students in the fall 2009, expanding to serve 300 admitted students in 2010. The success of the past two years moved the College of Engineering to expand the program to all incoming students in the College of Engineering. 

“From there, the students really started pushing the boundaries of what they were creating, and we wanted to run with this sense that we were unleashing a pretty neat world of possibilities,” Hyman said.

Bruce Litchfield, an assistant dean in the College of Engineering who has been involved with iFoundry for the past four years, was named the director of iEFX earlier this year. As the catalyst and incubator for iEFX, Hyman said iFoundry remains a supporting partner of iEFX.

“iFoundry is sort of like a research and development operation, and our first major successful product that has come off the line has been iefx, which is now running and growing under Dean Litchfield’s leadership,” Hyman said.

An integral part of both iFoundry’s and iEFX’s efforts has been an effort to establish a stronger sense of community within the engineering student body.

iFoundry and iEFX looked at the work of Russell Korte, an assistant professor in the College of Education, whose research on the transition of engineering graduates from college to the workplace shows that the top factor contributing to a successful transition is their ability to connect socially to other colleagues in the work environment.

“We took that learning and brought it down to the very beginning of the student experience to start a sense of community and connectedness from the get-go,” Hyman said. “If you take that joy of community seriously and really make great friendships within engineering, that all can make an enormous difference for these young students.”

Through the successful programs of the past few years, iFoundry and iEFX have found three main areas of interests for young engineers – Entrepreneurship, Building Creative Technologies and Engineering in Service to Society.

Around these three interest groups, iFoundry and iefx formed three different “Aspirational Communities” that meet regularly to discussed their shared interests and passions, while exploring related opportunities both on and off campus.

“I’ve watched our students over the last two or three years create startups together, teach each other computer languages, share expertise with each other,” Hyman said. “There really is a sense here that the growing student community is vital and central to the learning experience.”

Started in the summer of 2007, iFoundry was created as a cross-disciplinary curriculum incubator in the College of Engineering dedicated to the transformation of engineering education in ways appropriate to the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.

“They felt that it was time for an organization that would help address the challenges of change at a place like the University of Illinois, where, with all its wonders and strengths, it can be a bit difficult to foment change in education,” Hyman said.

Hyman said that there has been “normal human resistance and justified questioning” to the initiatives of iFoundry on campus, but she credits College of Engineering’s Dean Ilesanmi Adesida and Associate Dean for Academic Programs Charles Tucker for their continued support.

“The College of Engineering is genuinely committed to serving its undergraduate population,” Hyman said. “Anything we can do to make the undergraduate experience here better, they take seriously.”
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Contact: Karen Hyman, iFoundry & iEFX, 217/244-3824.

Writer/Photographer: Jay Lee, Engineering Communications Office.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.