UC Berkeley College of Engineering launches a new course to help engineers become better communicators

By Jessie Ying

“In particular, they need to learn how to communicate with members outside of their community, especially those from the management teams who often come from a different background, in order to get the credit they deserve for their achievements,” Tsu-Jae explained.

This new course seeks to address this issue by teaching students the basics of storytelling, reporting, researching and interviewing. Students will then need to find a research project within the college and write about it using the knowledge they have learned. This also serves Tsu-Jae’s other goal with the course: to recognize and publicize research that is being conducted within the college.

Currently, there is only a four-person marketing and communication team within the college that covers these stories. With this course, students will be able to showcase research that has been overlooked in the past. At the end of the semester, they will write blog posts about the research that will be posted on the college and university websites.

Sonner, a UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism alumna, will be co-teaching the course with Tsu-Jae. Before becoming a journalist, she was a public affairs officer for a research ship where she gained experience of translating scientific research into publicly consumable content for non-scientists. Bringing her expertise in communication, she and Tsu-Jae will provide a duo prospective in the classroom.

Alex Beliaev, who oversees the communication courses in the Master of Engineering program (MEng) at the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership, has helped to develop this course. “Our goal is to support the students as they commit to create a piece of media that matters to people outside of their immediate research community,” he said.

“It’s not the same course, but both commit to creating a piece that matters to people outside the immediate research community,” he said.

The communication courses have been an important component in the Fung Institute’s mission to foster not only engineers, but also leaders in the technology world. Tsu-Jae hopes this new course will also help undergraduate students with their professional development.

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