Chris Yip 0:01 Welcome to Tell Me More: Coffee with Chris Yip, the official podcast of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto. In our second season, I want to focus on the journey, how people got to school, what they did during their time here, and where they've ended up after graduation. You will meet students, professors and alumni, and learn what places them at the heart of designing bold solutions for a better world. My guest today is Professor Elham Marzi, who is a member of our newly constituted Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice or ISTEP. She brings a unique perspective to our faculty. For one thing, her expertise is not in engineering but rather in organizational behavior, human resources management, strategy and negotiations. Combine that with the fact that she's lived and studied in Europe, North America and the Middle East, and you can see how she is well positioned to prepare our students for a workplace that is increasingly global, connected, and multidisciplinary. Professor Marzi, Elham, welcome to the podcast. Elham Marzi 1:09 Thanks so much, Dean Yip. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to be here. Chris Yip 1:14 Great. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. We've talked a lot over the past, I guess few years actually, going back even before I was dean, about opportunities in this kind of global engineering education space and it's going to be terrific to have a discussion and chat today about your thoughts and your ideas in this particular, which is, I think, a super important area for our students to gain experience and opportunities and as I sort of said in the intro, really prepare them for what is an increasingly complex environment that they're going to end up working in as they exit school. So first off, it's always good to kind of go into the background of the speakers, my guests. So I said, you've you've been around the world as it were and give me a bit about your background and and how did we get you into engineering? Elham Marzi 2:03 Well, my path here hasn't been straightforward. As you pointed out, I have lived in a couple of different places in the world so I am one of the prime examples of a third culture individual or a third culture kid where I grew up somewhere different than where my parents originated. And then I moved again, so I've lived in a different different environment a couple of times over. And each time I moved, it led to a change in environment, a change in group of friends, a change in education systems, as well. So all of that movement, and chang in the environment around me, made me become a bit of a flexible person in relation to quickly making friends, quickly learning the ropes, adapting to new environments. And I thought, that's actually a really important skill. I know there's a lot of third culture kids out there who have those skills but then there's a lot of others who don't, who don't adapt well, can't kind of read those cues. So how do we kind of learn that? Now, before I arrived at that, a little bit more about my academic background, I started my first bachelor's thinking that I was going to study psychology and then go and become a lawyer. This was in the day and age of Ally McBeal and Law and Order - those were the popular shows. Started out in psych and realized, yeah, it's good, but I liked the applied stuff better so I navigated through to human resources and communications. Worked in the field a bit and realized that it wasn't as fulfilling as I'd hoped it would be so that led me to my second degree in information systems and then I came to U of T. When I did start my master's at U of T, I did start to find that passion and interest in human resources and organizational behavior, and then further developed that interest by doing a PhD at U of T as well and so here I am, and engineering, how did I get to engineering? It's complex. I started by being a TA for the courses that I teach right now. So that's how I got introduced to the engineering faculty. However, based on my own history, my father is an engineer, my brother is an engineer, my husband is kind of an engineer, so I'm kind of surrounded by them and that's given me a lot of familiarity with the risks and hazards of the environment, I suppose. Chris Yip 4:34 There you go. The engineering mindset, you've been sort of brought into the culture a little bit sideways as it were. I'm going to frame this a little bit just before we started to record this podcast. I just got off a taskforce meeting about engineering education and the future of engineering education in Canada and the topics that we're going to talk about - sort of that movement in engineering away from call it the classic physics, chemistry, you know, mechanics, calculus, all that sort of stuff and now introducing these other elements becoming much more of a holistic perspective on what engineering is. A lot of folks sort of assume engineering, it's the classic, got a hard hat on, carrying a clipboard, maybe not a clipboard now but your iPad, and you're doing calculations, and it's all about physics, is all about math, it's all about equations. But now we have seen in our students have been kind of the drivers, in a sense, right? The opportunities for things like leadership and team effectiveness and communications and, you know, from your experience, because you're coming at it from the other side, can you give us a sense of, you know, why is it so important that our engineering graduates sort of develop these skills and abilities, especially in the current world? Elham Marzi 5:45 I think when an engineer begins their career path, they don't do it in a vacuum. Engineers are here to make the world a better place but you can only make the world a better place, if you know how what you're particularly working on is going to fit within the realm of everything else. And sometimes it's who are the stakeholders for the new technology, the new application, the new advancement that I'm creating? Who are the users and how do I understand them better? Other times in a professional workplace, you have to learn how to collaborate better, to not just communicate and understand and design for, but to collaborate with. So how do we build better teams? How do we communicate better? How do engineers learn how to hire better people that are more suited to the jobs and tasks that they need? Our engineers leave here with a set of skills that prepare them to be a civil, a mechanical, an industrial engineer but are they also prepared to be a project manager? Are they also prepared to be a leader in a business? So to have those other skills, you have to be intentional about it. And what I particularly love about Applied Science and Engineering is that we have so many of these transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary courses available to students to help them prepare for those essential skills when they do join the workforce. We're not teaching them soft skills, we're teaching them what I love to call power skills. Chris Yip 7:20 That's a great way to frame it. Some engineers will go directly into their classic fields, but they are going to be working in the banking system, they're going to be working in government, they're going to be working in policy, they're going to be working for municipalities or not for profits leveraging their technical skills but at the same time, as you as you pointed out, what's so important is the ability to work cross culturally with diverse teams, the ability to communicate across sectors. So, I started out by introducing this sort of newly created Institute, our Institute for Studies in Transdisciplinary Engineering Education and Practice, the acronym for this institute is ISTEP. Maybe give us a little bit of sense of what ISTEP is, what is its mission? What is it focus? Elham Marzi 8:03 ISTEP is where we bring together a number of different components that help our students excel when they do get to the professional workspace. I know from the Communications Group, a lot of the components are integrated into so many of the core courses that engineering students across all of our disciplines take. We have leadership components as well that students are able to immerse themselves in whether they're looking to delve into their own story through some courses, or whether they're looking into where law and engineering come into play together. ISTEP is a place where everybody in engineering really belongs by strengthening the transdisciplinary concepts, but also providing pillars of support and development for students in all of the other disciplines that help them succeed no matter which path they go forward. On a different scale we also have the engineering education research that we do at graduate level. So there is a lot of extremely advanced and leading edge work that's happening with some of our grad students and faculty here as well. Chris Yip 9:18 One element I think, that I've been personally really struck by is this element of giving our students kind of that global perspective on things. I mean, we're in Toronto, 250-200 different languages spoken here, engineering draws from 40 to 50 different countries, we've got 35-40 different languages spoken by our undergraduates, but I'm seized by giving our students opportunities to work on the global scale. Part of I think what you're doing through your efforts and through ISTEP's efforts is really giving our students that ability to work cross culturally. Give us a sense of this initiative, which is called INVEST and I'm going to go backwards and say what the acronym stands for, which is International Virtual Engineering Student Teams. I personally find this a terrific opportunity and really fits with this narrative around creating globally aware students. You know, what was this this brainchild that you created here? Elham Marzi 10:09 I love talking about INVEST because as you just called it, brainchild, I'm not the only one that conceptualized it that brought it into being. Murray Metcalfe, Rahim Rezaie, Oluwatobi Edun, Anuli Ndubuisi, this is the INVEST team and as you said, INVEST stands for International Virtual Engineering Student Teams. It is an opportunity for us to create a support system for either research projects that are ongoing or research projects, which up until now, we've mostly facilitated to come into existence and then for us to kind of just latch on and support the students who are engaging in these international cross institutional research projects by helping them navigate the virtual international relationships. This came into being when I attended an Engineering for Sustainable Cities in Africa meeting. They were doing some brainstorming and I suggested this idea based on a course that I taught at Rotman when I was doing my PhD. And this course had a project in it that was called X-Culture. X-Culture allowed students from around the world at different universities and business courses to work together in a group project over the course of about two and a half months. So that's where the ideas started, where the seed for the idea was planted. And from those discussions, we drove it further, and through the supportive Dean Christina Ammon, and a DFF fund, we were granted the opportunity to put this idea into action. So early 2019, we started recruiting different universities around the world that might want to partake in establishing a research project. We put some legwork in, but eventually we got some pilots off the ground and then after the pilot was done, we had some other faculty from different institutions eager and interested to collaborate. And now we're at the point where we've had about 20 projects over the past two years, and the students typically work with other student counterparts at the partner institution, they work for four to eight months on a research project. Now, this is either engineering undergraduate students or graduate students. They'll work together over the course of the four to eight months, and we will do the add-on modules that will help them develop those international cross cultural communication, virtual team conflict decision, all of those kinds of essential skills that you think oh, I know how to make decisions in teams, what are you talking about? And then you get to a roadblock and you're like, what? How are we running into challenges? So that's kind of what we try to help the students learn. It's an essential skill that everybody thinks they have until they have to use it and they realize what's going on. Chris Yip 13:00 This is really grown from I think, if I remember, you had sort of one or two institutions. I think one was partnered into Africa initially, how has it scaled down? How many institutions? Where are they located in the world? Elham Marzi 13:10 The last count, I think we had somewhere between either 11 or 14. I remember updating the presentation two weeks ago, but since we've had discussions with two more partners. And in terms of where in the world were some pretty exciting places, we started with partnership in South Africa and in Trinidad and Tobago. We have some potential partnerships that we're hoping to establish in China, with even the US I mean, I say, even the US because culturally, we think we're very similar until we start collaborating. And we've got partners in Germany, where we've got a couple of different active projects ongoing right now, partners in Ecuador, Brazil, couple of different partners in Brazil. I would say almost every continent we've tried to establish a relationship and we've got contacts around the globe. Chris Yip 13:58 To me what I found was really excited about this is that this kind of interaction, at one level, you get the students within the institutions have to learn how to work as teams, then you've got to get the students working internationally, in a sense, right? The two teams have to be able to talk to each other. But I think it also starts to replicate a lot of how companies are working now when they've got operations in different countries and they have to have the interdisciplinary teams working everywhere, cross culturally between the head office that may be in Toronto and their satellite operations in Dubai and linking with a group down in Chile and so on. And this really, I think, gives the students a taste of what's coming when they do emerge as a graduate for the program and they land in these companies with these particular opportunities. There is this new initiative that universities are just about to launch which is the first ever kind of tri-campus minor in global leadership and global citizenship. You are playing a leadership role in this and actually you are part of the team which actually pulled this all together over the past couple of years. Can you give us a - give our audience a little bit of a sense of what that is? I'll preface it by saying it's one of the minors and certificates that our engineering students are able to take in addition to their core disciplinary focus. So Elham, give us a sense of what is involved in this this new initiative. Elham Marzi 15:19 Absolutely, I want to maybe clarify just one thing here, if I may. I started in the global leadership, minor team just within the past year and it's been a wonderful experience. I wasn't one of the founding members, but I am very passionate about what we're doing and very passionate about being able to bring an opportunity for students, not just across disciplines, but across all three of the campuses to go through a program together to realize that there's so much intentionality, not only about leadership, but about being a global leader. So I think that there's so many incredibly important aspects to this global leadership minor, that's going to allow for our students not only to learn how to work together here while they're at university, but to create better workplaces when they graduate, and they go forward and they represent our university as alumni in the workforce in society. Looking at how each of the three different campuses are collaborating on building the courses for the minor is phenomenal, realizing that there are so many faculty that are putting effort into developing these courses that will support the students, but also the way the students are going to go through the program, how they're going to be together as part of the program is pretty special. And I think we're going to be hosting, fingers crossed, hosting, from what I've heard through the grapevine, the Capstone here in engineering, at least for the first year or so. So I'm really excited about seeing all of that positive energy come into engineering and allow us to guide students through that experience in the Capstone. I'm really excited about that. Chris Yip 17:01 I will give you a shout out. You were appointed as one of the advisors of Global Classrooms to our Offices of Vice President, International. I think this really was a testament to the effort you had pulled on INVEST, right? How was that experience? Elham Marzi 17:15 Guilty as charged, yes. So that experience was phenomenal. We have a event coming up this week to kind of wrap up the first year of Global Classroom and I can't tell you how much I enjoyed every second that I worked with that team. Firstly, because the team was so passionate about what we were doing about generating and building more global classrooms throughout the University of Toronto at all three campuses. Secondly, because of all of the ideas we saw people put together and present in how they're pushing their classrooms and how they're changing how they're teaching, to engage more global concepts to engage more international partners. So it was really invigorating to see that it's not just in engineering, it's not just in one program but there is a thirst for this not only from the students, but also from faculty to see opportunities and to see enthusiasm for it. I think I should give you examples. There was examples where students who wouldn't be able to travel abroad in one particular course, were going to be getting a tour, a physical, virtual tour of a museum that would add to their course, there was another course, I believe this was in medical science or dentistry, where they were partnered with counterparts who were studying the same thing in a different institution somewhere else in the world. So there were so many creative ways that faculty were pushing the limits on how you can incorporate global content into your classroom, to make things real for students, to make it relatable. Chris Yip 18:52 This is all about changing up the classic come to a lecture and listen to a professor drone on about stuff. This is more about the experiential learning, whether it's a virtual experiential with a class counterpart learning the same material in a different city, whether it's different ways of doing it. Part of what I find so exciting is the opportunity for our students to see what else is - how materials delivered, how material is presented in this global context, but from the perspective of different disciplines and what does that mean for what is classically an engineering discipline where you're in the lab doing stuff, and this is a different type of learning environment we want to create. You are so involved in so many things, and maybe that's, I guess I could take part blame for that because I keep volunteering you for things, but I also want to point out that you are also driving a really cool initiative, which I think builds a little bit off of INVEST but this is this Global Engineering Design Studio sorry, that's the GEDS, the Global Engineering Design Studio initiative. I think it brings together, what is it? Seven different institutions are set up together on a project and this is actually currently underway. Give our listeners a little bit of a sense of what is the GEDS. Elham Marzi 20:06 I am a part of the team so I am the U of T representative. And it's a fantastic experience. So we started, I would say mid-year, last year may have been summer, may have been earlier, coming up with this opportunity for students from we started with eight or nine different universities, but boiled down to the seven core universities who are engaging. We are from Australia, New Zealand, US, Canada, and England, and well UK. And so altogether, there were three core problems that we are presenting the students with. So they have a period of eight weeks in order to work in these global virtual teams together to find a solution to the problems. It's obviously a design-based solution and obviously a design-based challenge but we're also offering on Saturdays, a weekly module or weekly workshop for the students to come together to learn, to develop and each week is hosted by a different institution that's a partner in the program. So we just completed week four, and the students are just at the halfway point. We're super excited about the showcase that's coming up in week eight. So that should be really exciting. The program has come together really well. I think one of the areas that the program is really hoping to drive forward after this pilot run is done, is to see if there's a possibility to bring these seven or eight or nine institutions that are interested in participating together to offer for credit-type courses. So at this point, it's a certificate opportunity where students can engage and they'll receive some sort of recognition for what they're doing but it would be marvelous if we could find, much like the global leadership minor, an opportunity for all eight institutions, or all seven institutions, to give students a course credit, to recognize the work that students are doing as part of this global design challenge, motivating them to remain not only engaged, but to actively pursue more creative solutions. That's that's where the program is going, it's really successful, we have an excellent bunch of students and excellent number of staff and faculty who've been engaged up until now and really optimistic about seeing how the next few weeks go. Chris Yip 22:30 So I'm going to throw a curveball, maybe a bit of a curveball at you. Where do you see the future of engineering education? I mean, it's a professional field, our students come out, they become professional engineers, are trained in technical disciplines like dentistry, it's like the medical disciplines, right? You've got a specialty and yet, we need them to be broad. So with your crystal ball, how would you foresee the faculty changing to accommodate sort of these interesting opportunities? Elham Marzi 23:08 This is a heavy question for me to answer. I think, where I see engineering going is rather than diverging more converging, and I'll explain. I think that there is an interest in interdisciplinary and collaboration, just like we talk about how there's inter-institutional collaborations happening with the GEDS program, or inter-institutional collaborations happening with the INVEST program, or the Global Classrooms. It's less about spreading further and more about coming together and converging in the sense of not conforming, but understanding and sharing knowledge. The internet has made it so widely accessible to get access to any information you want and I think for us to be able to collaborate and communicate with each other and to synthesize our shared knowledge and to build a new vision I think that's the direction engineering is probably going to allow for more multidisciplinary collaborations. See that on the rise, to be able to solve some of these wicked design problems, to be able to take a multidimensional approach to where we want to go. Those skills are going to be integral, allowing us not just to - there's a school of thought that what we teach the students here at U of T, or at any other institution during their undergrad, isn't always going to be one to one in terms of what they use when they go out into the workplace. We don't need to teach them to memorize content, and they're not going to need to pull out that little card in their wallet with a formula on it when they're in the workplace quite as often as they think they might. There's no need for a cheat sheet in the workplace but we need to be able to learn how to be flexible and adaptable and apply our varied skills in different contexts. And that movement, those transdisciplinary skills, those are the things that our students are going to need as they become professionals out in the workforce. And that's part of what the engineering business minor is hoping to do too. I know, I wear many hats, as you've said in many conversations, but my main hat is the engineering business minor, being able to help our engineers bring together some of their ideas, so they can synthesize how they understand their work environment, and how they can bring some of these business skills or some of these international intercultural skills and global skills to the workforce to be able to work better as a teammate work better as a leader. Chris Yip 25:52 Exciting times ahead, we will hold you to your crystal ball and see how that goes. So let me just say thank you so much for for taking this time this afternoon to chat about what you are doing inside ISTEP and your initiatives which are truly global in scope. Elham Marzi 26:14 Well, thank you for the opportunity to be here and for all of the support and encouragement. I think one of the things that engineering does well for its faculty and its students is provide a supportive and encouraging environment. If you're looking for it, there's opportunities to take on new challenges and new directions and, and achieve what you want to achieve. So I'm privileged in that sense, I'm really happy where I am and optimistic about where I can drive some of these initiatives forward. Chris Yip 26:42 Thanks again for listening to Coffee with Chris Yip. If you want to catch up on past episodes, or make sure that you don't miss the next one, please subscribe. We're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. Just look for Coffee with Chris Yip. You can also check out @UofTengineering on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn for more stories about how our community is building a better world. And finally, if you'd be inspired to join us, we'd love to welcome you. Whether you're thinking of taking a degree or working with us on our research project, you can find us online and engineering.utoronto.ca. Or you can visit our beautiful campus in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I hope I can join you for coffee soon.