It may stem from her Greek heritage, but Olga Pierrakos, U.S. National Science Foundation Program Director for STEM Education and founding leader of Wake Forest University’s Engineering program, is passionate about more than just engineering education. She has a love for poetry. And history. And philosophy. And performing arts.
These are not the typical passions most expect from an engineer. That’s kind of the point.
“I just enjoy knowledge and connecting knowledge, whatever the subject matter is,” Pierrakos says. “For me, liberal arts are just who we are.”
It’s that passion for connecting knowledge that led Pierrakos to establish an undergraduate engineering program at one of the nation’s leading liberal arts universities. But if you had a portal to look back at her early years, a career in engineering education was not always a foregone conclusion.
How does someone fall in love with engineering education?
Young Pierrakos waffled between wanting to be a ballerina and a doctor. But when she was in fifth grade, her family emigrated from Greece to the United States, and she discovered a talent in mathematics.
“Even though English was my second language, I excelled in math because I had a solid foundation and I could do math without needing to understand English,” Pierrakos remembers.
When she entered college, Pierrakos, who was a first-generation college student, initially intended to be a doctor, so she majored in biology.
“Biology felt like a lot of memorizing, and I felt the need to do something more applied,” Pierrakos says.
Her high school counselors suggested she lean into her math prowess and become an engineer. One problem:
“I thought engineering was about being a car mechanic,” Pierrakos says. “That just shows you what I knew about engineering.”
But as Pierrakos took engineering classes, her perspective changed. She fell in love–deeply enough to spend 11 years at Virginia Tech studying mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, and aerospace engineering (most students pick one track).
“I fell in love with the engineering mindset that brought both theory and practice together,” Pierrakos says.
But even as Pierrakos was falling in love with her chosen profession, she saw problems cropping up in STEM education and higher education as a whole. As she continued on in higher education (as a professor this time), she began to see how the challenges she faced as a student were signs of failings in how higher education was constructed and staffed.
“We have an opportunity to rethink how we educate the next generation of professionals, not only to prepare them for a lifetime of careers, but also so they know their purpose in society. Higher education is under attack, and the opportunities are many,” Pierrakos says.
What is threatening higher education in the U.S?
As a student, Pierrakos had a variety of interests: engineering, philosophy, history, poetry, music, arts, and math. Her favorite class was an engineering course taught by a philosopher. Her own engineering degrees, however, didn’t allow for much crossover between disciplines or interests.
To understand the connections between disciplines–even within engineering–Pierrakos had to trace very literal paths between departments, walking from one building to another to get her questions answered about the connections between electrical, mechanical, aerospace, and civil engineering.
“I had to be extremely proactive. There was no natural pathway between disciplines,” Pierrakos says. “The traditional model of higher education and engineering education is so siloed and yet it does not need to be.”
For engineers in particular, curriculum and courses are exceptionally rigid. In their first year of undergraduate school, engineering students typically pick their discipline–civil engineering, medical engineering, mechanical engineering, etc.–after a single introductory class, and then they are locked into that choice for the next four years.
Once the choice is made, the curriculum for students is largely set, with very little change. There’s a strict set of courses that are required that fill a student’s time. In Pierrakos’ view, engineering is not the only discipline suffering from stagnation.
“You can look at most departments in higher education–their curricula are so outdated. They might change a course title here and there, adjust a couple of prerequisites, but the knowledge that they’re basically teaching is stuck and siloed,” Pierrakos says.
Why is it stuck? According to Pierrakos, it’s because institutions of higher learning have not built diverse teams of educators and have not promoted a better balance between theoretical and practical knowledge and skills.
In Pierrakos’ own academic experience, this showed up not just in the curriculum, but also in more obvious ways. In the 11 years Pierrakos spent as a student in higher education, never once did she have a female engineering faculty and, typically, she was one of only a few female students in her class. Put that on top of being in a cultural minority, and the combination created even more pressure. As a woman and an ethnic engineer, she stood out.
“It’s tiring after a while, it means you’re constantly proving yourself every single day and every single hour,” Pierrakos says. “But I also felt the responsibility to stand out for the next generation, just like the women that came before me did by opening pathways.”
Creating new pathways for diverse perspectives meant addressing all the ways that higher education puts boundaries on knowledge.
“The silos that we’ve created at all levels of STEM education are just a mindset,” Pierrakos says. “We have students who are curious about so many things, and yet we block that with structures and systems that limit them and that will continue to limit us as a country if we don’t fix them.”
What’s the big deal about those limits? If it’s just a matter of preference, does it really matter if information and learning is siloed? For Pierrakos, it’s all about preparing students for their lives outside of the classroom.
“We have a responsibility to educate the next group of citizens–not just scientists or engineers–but all-around citizens, and that responsibility comes with giving them a current state of knowledge and skills that will help them not only in their first job, but also over an entire career,” Pierrakos says. “When we continue to live with siloed education and it’s not put into practice, it limits our ability to effectively produce productive citizens, whether they’re scientists, engineers, philosophers, whatever.”
In her mind, students need to be positioned for success with any degree.
How do you galvanize engineering education?
Throughout her schooling, Pierrakos discovered an interest not just in engineering, but also how the profession was taught. She was awarded a postdoctoral position to do research in engineering education from the National Academy of Engineering, an experience that helped her better understand the educational side of engineering and gave her insight into trends in higher learning in the United States.
“Higher education and engineering education are seeing changes in enrollment, student demographics, and criticism from employers, students and parents,” Pierrakos says. “We have an opportunity to combine the best of the liberal arts education with the best of a professional education, an opportunity to bring theory and practice together with every degree and every curriculum, but I have not seen many universities do that.”
When she completed her postdoc, Pierrakos received two very different job offers: She could go the traditional route and become an assistant professor in mechanical and biomedical engineering or start a brand new engineering program at James Madison University and build that program from scratch.
Pierrakos had an advisor who warned her that the latter option was a career killer, but she took on the challenge anyway.
“I wanted to be on the ground floor of rethinking how we do engineering education,” Pierrakos says.
She figured, what’s the best way to attack the silos and limits placed on STEM education and higher education as a whole? Build an engineering program–curriculum, instructors, and all–from the ground up.
So that’s what Pierrakos did. Twice. First, as a founding faculty member at James Madison University in 2007 and then again as head of the department at Wake Forest University in 2017.
If that didn’t keep her busy enough, she also continued her engineering research in cardiovascular fluid mechanics and sustainable energy technology systems, while also studying and publishing a plethora of research in the field of education itself.
Blending everything she learned from decades of research across disciplines, Pierrakos started coming to some conclusions about what the future of education needed. What would she use as the foundation of rethinking engineering education? The hallmark of engineering: user-centered design or, more plainly, figuring out what the students actually wanted to learn.
What do students want from their engineering education?
After founding the engineering department at James Madison University, Pierrakos took an intervening position (more on that later), but after a few years, she was lured back into program-building by an offer to be part of building a new undergraduate engineering department at Wake Forest University.
With this new program, Pierrakos was building on lessons learned and bringing new voices into the conversation about what engineering education should look like.
“Students don’t just want theory, they want to see theory put into practice,” Pierrakos says. “Engineering education should show how theory comes to life through practice.”
At Wake Forest, Pierrakos made practical applications of theory mandatory for every class. Whether it was through a lab, a project, or field work, courses needed to bring theory to life through practice. In addition, the four-year degree was structured in a way that allowed students to choose an engineering specialty later in the program–or not at all.
Practical applications also became a part of her hiring process–she sought out instructors who could deliver on that vision and who represented a variety of perspectives. Pierrakos made it a priority to hire faculty who were diverse not just in gender, race, and ethnicity to ensure that Wake’s students didn’t face the same problems she did as a student, but also diverse in terms of their engineering expertise so that students were exposed to the range of professions and skills that exist in engineering.
With the emphasis on the practical and the focus on building a solid, broad foundation rather than specializing early, Wake Forest was shaping up to be a different animal than the average undergraduate engineering program.
Then Pierrakos went and broke with tradition in an even more significant way. She asked the students what they wanted to study.
“Sometimes we think that students don’t know what they want to learn, but they have a lot of insight,” Pierrakos says.
Instead of going to the faculty and asking them what they’d like to teach, she would ask students what areas they were interested in studying and what they hoped to get from their undergraduate experience. By asking those questions, she was able to tailor engineering education somewhat, customizing aspects of the curricula for each particular cohort of students. The diverse faculty represented many engineering knowledge areas and could deliver on the interests of the students.
For Pierrakos, the students’ opinions and desires carried a lot of weight, helping to determine what courses were offered each year. In addition to surveying current students, Pierrakos also sought input from former students, who provided perspectives on what learning had helped them most in their careers.
For example, one thing Pierrakos learned is that students wanted the flexibility to study abroad, something that is not typically an option for engineering students, given the rigid curriculum of most engineering programs. There’s simply not enough time.
“Study abroad programs are a distinguishing feature of Wake Forest as an institution,” Pierrakos says. “Our students recognize that they need to be global citizens in a global world, and they have a desire to experience a different culture and experience learning in a different culture.”
How do you make study abroad opportunities available in a discipline not known for its flexibility? Pierrakos and the engineering department took a good hard look at the curriculum and reworked its structure to open space for students to study abroad in places like Australia, Chile, Netherlands, London, and Italy.
One student who studied in Venice, Italy for a semester found the experience career-changing. Initially interested in biomedical engineering, she became interested in structural engineering during her study abroad experience, a degree that she went back to Italy to earn.
“We saw that time and time again as students went to many different parts of the world and had a glimpse of different ways of thinking, different ways of seeing,” Pierrakos says.
With this innovative approach to engineering education, Pierrakos felt strongly that the undergraduate programs at James Madison and Wake Forest demonstrated that there were other ways to prepare students for the careers ahead of them.
“I’ve always fought to break the silos within engineering, but we need to break the silos that exist in higher education, too,” Pierrakos says. “But those changes are often seen as a threat to the culture of higher education.”
So where do you take the fight to improve STEM education across the country? Somewhere with the words “national” AND “science” in the name: the National Science Foundation (NSF).
What’s the solution for STEM education?
If you’re going to change education across institutions, you need to influence decisions at the highest level. Rather than influencing one institution at a time, the NSF has the ability to influence many institutions of higher learning.
As a federal agency, the NSF distributes funds to support scientific research in the United States, a component of which is funding undergraduate STEM education initiatives. After founding the engineering program at Wake Forest, Pierrakos took a position as a program director with the NSF.
“The NSF is probably one of the funding agencies that invests the most in STEM education,” Pierrakos says. “As a program director, you see the innovation that’s happening nationwide from both course-level innovation to institutional innovation, rethinking how we do STEM education.”
Pierrakos also worked for the NSF for a couple years between starting engineering programs at James Madison and Wake Forest University. That experience opened the door to her current position at the NSF and broadened the knowledge and expertise she brought to building the Wake Forest engineering program. This time, Pierrakos, who is based out of Wake Downtown in the Innovation Quarter, hopes to advocate and support innovative STEM education initiatives.
“We tend to bucket students, saying they’re either good in science and math or in English and history, but that’s not true,” Pierrakos. “I’m doing research in biomedical engineering with a student who’s a musician and majors in French Studies, and she actually is able to grasp key research concepts much better than some engineering students that I’ve had. In class, she may not have the analytical skills that other students have learned, but her contributions to the research are meaningful. The point being, we’ve put boundaries around knowledge in ways that we don’t need to.”
As a program director at the NSF, she is part of the frontline of funding education initiatives from across the nation that can make a difference in how the country’s education system develops.
“Right now, I’m at the National Science Foundation because I have knowledge, I have experiences that are really important for us to think about from a national level,” Pierrakos. “As a funding agency, we need to be able to help our higher education system survive. But it requires change.”
Fortunately, change is something that Pierrakos has never been afraid to embrace.
