Undergraduate Voices, Volume 1 (2018)

In this volume, Grace Ports explores ethics education in engineering. She explains why engineering students need to engage with ethics and examines possibilities offered by formal and experiential learning of ethics for engineering students. Julia Weber asks why the field of engineering is male-dominated and why this condition should change. She discusses the proportion of men in the field in comparison with women and focuses on discrimination against women in the workplace. Alec Raber presents his thoughts about sustainability in chemical engineering by highlighting concepts such as industrial ecology and green engineering. Seth Adams advocates for more experiential learning in medical schools and presents experiences of community-based learning and situated learning recommended in medical education literature. Katherine Theis compares student engineers’ knowledge of ethics learned at college with ethical practices they acquire when they are embedded in their professional contexts after graduation. Bailey Reid reflects on how engineers interact with communities they enter for conducting their projects. Reid invites engineers to regard communities as potential partners rather than obstacles that professionals should work around. Matt Westman looks at various businesses and writes about how they view and deal with the idea of making their practice more environmentally sustainable. He explores the benefits for businesses that choose to “go green” to show the investment of being more environmentally conscious is worth the extra money. Finally, Jared Beach, in a reflective article, presents his philosophical speculations about the ethical considerations that entrepreneurs and business leaders need to engage with