Something I learned from my dad was the importance of fundamentals.  Once a student gets fundamental concepts, they can develop the rest on their own.  I’ve found the most important thing is self-learning, independent learning.

When I taught piano, I would tell students, “I don’t have to be here.  I don’t have to be with you for you to learn something.  You just want me to teach you the basics.”  And from there, they got it. At first it was difficult, but because I trained them to be like that, they got it.  I take the same approach in engineering, because I believe in lifelong learning and I believe in independent learning.

There are a lot of things that excite me, really. For us to impact lives of future engineers, that’s something that comes to mind. Engineering is not just about going to space; it’s far beyond that.

In Nigeria, where I come from, we take classes like engineering economics and engineering management, because an engineer is supposed to be a critic. We are trained to be creative thinkers.  It’s not just about the engineering field alone.  So that’s part of what excites me about training engineers to be that critical thinkers and logical thinkers that are not only useful in their engineering profession, but in other aspects of life.

Presently, engineering education is not as publicly shown as I would love it to be.  Sometimes when I tell people I’m doing my research in engineering education, they’re like “What?!”  They don’t even understand what I’m saying, but I would love if—in the next few years—it should be a major, critical part of engineering, even incorporating it into the undergraduate curriculum.