Dr. Branson’s course was by far the most personally valuable class I took during my entire college career. The class simulated a real-world engineering environment working on a real project in a collaborative team environment as opposed to the traditional classroom setting. While traditional teaching absolutely has its purpose and isn’t going anywhere, I believe this is a complement to it that’s desperately needed if students are going to graduate with a real certainty they can actually apply what they’ve learned in the real world – I would argue, in fact, that you have no idea if you’ve really learned something or not until you’ve successfully applied that knowledge in a practical fashion. His teaching style worked so well for my classmates and I that two other students and I then deliberately sought to continue working with him for our Senior Capstone project, knowing full well the challenge that would entail.

What I observed for both myself and of my fellow classmates, through the course of the semester we became a solid team who were all highly engaged and motivated, not just for a good grade, but because we were all invested in producing the best Circuit Board Mill we could, going above and beyond the minimum project requirements by choice. Frankly, I personally was so focused on the project itself I forgot at times that we were being graded on it. At no other point in my academic career have I ever observed a group of students voluntary and eagerly choose to do substantially more than the absolute bare minimum to get the grade, nor have I ever observed a class with such a consistently high attendance, participation rate and general morale. Following the conclusion of my Capstone Project course the following semester, our project was still not finished to the desired point (due to factors outside of Dr. Branson’s or our control) and despite the conclusion of the semester and our having obtained our diplomas, another student and I still came entirely voluntarily and eagerly to work with Dr. Branson to try and get it to the desired state in our free time, not for any grade or obligation, but because we wanted to get the fullest experience from it and to reach the full sense of accomplishment we had been working towards.

For my personal experience, I was someone who struggled significantly in the traditional academic setting, but I felt I was able for once to actually thrive in his classroom. In fact, if I hadn’t previously, by dumb luck, found myself at a student hackathon earlier in my college career at which I was able to do some real, hands-on engineering, I had been planning on dropping out at the end of that semester; it was at that point I realized I actually did genuinely enjoy engineering and it was just formal academia I was ill-suited for. I believe that if courses like what Dr. Branson is proposing were available to students, particularly lowerclassmen, it would help them see past the immediate stress of their course loads and know what they’re working towards doing long-term, and help put everything in perspective. Instead of just having seemingly-disconnected theoretical concepts and hostile-looking equations dumped on them while exam dates loom uncomfortably close, they would have the opportunity to go “Hey! I think I can use this to solve that one problem in the project!” or “You know, I bet this is the key to making the project more efficient!” Giving students that higher, real purpose beyond just a vague “you’ll need to know this later when you’re working” or worse, just “This will be on the test”, increases knowledge retention exponentially. Everyone has a different learning style, and I believe there’s a very high percentage of students like myself who could have made excellent engineers, but who didn’t have the same hackathon experience by sheer accident, that dropped out and were lost to the profession.

That isn’t to say it was easy, as overall the project scope and timeline was rather aggressive, but with Dr. Branson mentoring us through each hurdle along the way, each challenge and setback became a valuable teaching moment rather than a failure. For me, this was the one time I really felt like a professor was actually on my side, making sure I had a working knowledge of the material, rather than taking on an indifferent, almost adversarial position from the lectern. I believe the traditional academic format, in which failure is simply punished with a poor grade and moved on from, is an incredibly inefficient method of teaching and creates an unhealthy approach towards failure later in a real-world environment; initial failure at an endeavor can be one of the most powerful teachers you can have. Dr. Branson’s mentorship approach makes a huge stride towards fixing this by turning an unsuccessful first iteration into an ultimate triumph from which the students leave fully certain of what they’ve learned. Very often it seemed to me through school that the “difficult” classes were arbitrarily made difficult because of some notion that “hard” classes had to fail a lot of students or they weren’t being run correctly, but there’s difficulty for the sake of difficulty and then there’s a fair challenge driving one to be the best they can be, and those aren’t the same. That isn’t to say that plenty of the electrical engineering curriculum isn’t genuinely very difficult, but the difference in Dr. Branson’s approach was to inspire students to rise to the occasion rather than simply force them to jump through the hoops or else.

If there’s no other takeaway from this, I truly believe I learned more from Dr. Branson’s approach to teaching in the two semesters I was studying and working with him than I did in the rest of my academic career, and I know what I learned under him I can apply with certainty. I’ve always learned most effectively by doing, and beyond all of the technical learning required, I think his courses have helped me to develop a better engineering mindset for approaching practical problems that simply can’t be obtained from theoretical knowledge and equations. I truly believe that if this program were rolled out on a far wider scale to students at schools across the country to have any sort of similar experience to mine, then the United States will not only be able to maintain our technological lead over the rest of the world, but pull ahead even further. And those students will likewise have brighter futures ahead of themselves.

Jacob R.