Professional Skills Curriculum for Collaborative STEM Work
The Context
In Spring 2022, I was an undergraduate in a project-based Computer Science program where students worked in teams on industry-sponsored projects. During end-of-semester feedback sessions, a pattern emerged: teams struggled with communication, feedback, assumptions about competence, and exclusionary group dynamics that directly affected project outcomes.
Although the program emphasized “working successfully in diverse and inclusive environments” as a graduation outcome, there were no structured learning experiences that taught students how to do this work in practice.
The Challenge
The gap wasn’t a lack of intention — it was a lack of infrastructure. Professional collaboration skills were expected, but not taught systematically.
I wanted to design learning experiences that treated communication, self-awareness, and team dynamics as learnable professional skills, rather than traits students were assumed to already have.
My Approach
I designed a modular curriculum grounded in cognitive psychology, experiential learning, and professional communication research. Before writing content, I established evaluative benchmarks to ensure the curriculum was evidence-based, pedagogically sound, adaptable across semesters, and feasible within required coursework.
The result was a multi-semester curriculum embedded directly into the program, where students applied concepts immediately within their project teams rather than learning them in isolation.
The Impact
What began as a student-initiated intervention became permanent program infrastructure.
The curriculum was adopted as required coursework, served multiple cohorts over successive semesters, and generated assessable evidence aligned with program outcomes and industry expectations. The work was later published as peer-reviewed research at the 2025 ACM SIGDOC Conference, documenting both the framework and its implementation.
I returned as a researcher to continue refining and studying the curriculum alongside faculty from computer science, engineering, and technical communication.