Description
Effective communication is crucial for effective leadership, which is particularly relevant today. Recent events illustrate countless examples of cases where the same data or set of events are covered by different media stations, and although the underlying facts are the same, different news outlets are able to portray a wide array of very contrasting interpretations of what actually happened. In some cases, this is done intentionally to encourage viewers to adopt a particular viewpoint, but in other cases this naturally occurs due to bias of the writers.
Most effective leaders are able to present facts in such a way to compel their audience to feel a certain way or believe a certain narrative, and a disconnect in understanding between the leader and their audience is often undesirable and avoided at all costs. Within engineering, it is often the case that this difference in understanding stems from a miscommunication of technical material to a nontechnical audience, which is something we need to be particularly cognizant of as engineering students hoping to make a positive impact in the world. As someone who is planning on pursuing a research- oriented career path, I believe that it’s far too common for researchers to be incredibly meticulous when it comes to carefully analyzing their data, but then not take the time to fully share the story of why their results matter in the greater context of the world, especially to those outside their field. As an example, there are lots of graphs that attempt to convince the general public that climate change is an issue, but many of them are displayed in a plain graph that doesn’t really communicate the severity of this issue, despite technically presenting the data. Although he presented the same data, cartoonist Randall Munroe is able to clearly communicate the fuller story through this comic (https://xkcd.com/1732/), which tells a story that many of the technical graphs widely circulated online miss.
Through this project, my primary goal is as follows: to learn and practice techniques to share compelling stories with data. To this end, I plan to start with textbook examples, then work my way into “real- world” examples using media I come across. I chose to go with a Miro board since it enables both asynchronous discussion through post- its and synchronous conversations over zoom. I anticipate that these discussions will be informative for everyone involved - after these discussions, I hope that my peers take away insights related to data communication that they incorporate into their future work, and I hope that these discussions help me to see which parts of my work were effective in communicating a story and which parts were confusing for my audience.
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SAG REFLECTION SPRING 2018 by Sarah Deng : This past week I had the pleasure of attending the Northeast Bioengineering Conference at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This was my first large conference and it was an amazing and educational experience. The talks were super interesting. Among my favorites was the orthopedic engineering seminar, which talked about someone developing a robotic glove using a kind of synthetic string that shortened when an electric current was run through it. It was amazing to see not just because they were so close to a successful product that would help millions in rehabilitation, but also that the product actually came out a mistake made by their lab earlier on. This led to the accidental discovery of this filament that had the shrinking properties. Something else that I found really cool is that some of the doctors who has talks spoke about the role of entrepreneurship in their professional careers, which is pretty in line with what goes on at Olin. In fact, I actually saw some overlap with the material we learned in Products and Markets. Many presenters cited the Lean Model Canvas, something highlighted a lot in the class. The poster sessions were also a great experience. Because I presented two research posters, one per session, I was able to fully enjoy the design poster session. I saw a lot of really amazing devices made for problems that would benefit many. For example, one team created s small device that would help alleviate menstrual pain, which is a very prevalent issue. In the research session, I was actually one of the few undergraduates present, so it was really cool to be among such accomplished students. I was able to talk to other people in my field about my work, which helped me develop new ideas for future research. I was also able to tell people about Olin and some people in the education space recognized Olin and came up to talk to me about the school and my experiences there, which was really interesting. Overall, I really enjoyed the conference and the opportunity to really immerse myself in the bioengineering field and see what it’s like to be in the real world!
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