Amy Lerner, associate professor of biomedical engineering is among one of the 2016 recipients of the\u00a0Goergen Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t start in engineering. My dad was an engineer, but no one could convince me that engineering was what I should do.<\/strong> I majored in textile design at Cornell and worked for four years designing the Shuttle space suit for a company in Delaware called ILC Dover. While I was doing that, I thought, \u201cThis is engineering. I\u2019d like to do that.\u201d So I went to the University of Delaware for my engineering degree and discovered biomedical engineering. And I realized you could do that for a day job.<\/p>\n The first thing I ask freshmen is, \u201cWhy are you here? What does BME mean to you?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the things I advise students\u00a0 is to look 10 years ahead. What are they thinking they want to do? Look at the job postings\u2014not the ones you want tomorrow but the ones you want to become qualified for down the road. Some students try to do too much at once. You have 10 years to get there.<\/p>\n When I\u2019m teaching, I work hard to present the work [in the context of a real problem that someone needs a solution to]. That\u2019s the heart of our senior design program.<\/strong><\/p>\n In biomedical engineering, we felt that to prepare students for the challenges they\u2019re going to face in the future, they have to work with a real customer with a real problem. The students must learn to solve the problem and tactfully deal with a customer who might have unrealistic expectations.<\/p>\n Good design comes from good failures.<\/strong> We\u2019re floating 16 different projects this year, and we believe in Edison\u2019s philosophy: \u201cI have not failed. I\u2019ve just found 10,000 ways it won\u2019t work.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n We don\u2019t expect 100 percent success from projects. We expect 100 percent improvement from students. It\u2019s great when we get a product out the door. But I\u2019m getting a product out the door every time we graduate a student.<\/p>\n MonoMano is one of the more exciting projects we\u2019ve had. It\u2019s a company that sells adaptive cycling equipment for stroke victims and amputees, and it\u2019s another example of me throwing a challenge at students and them proving me wrong.<\/strong><\/p>\n I said, \u201cYou know, you\u2019re probably not going to do anything with this, so let\u2019s give it away. Put it on the web and give it away. I\u2019m tired of having these ideas sit on a shelf.\u201d I told them that on a Thursday. On Monday morning, they told me they were starting a company and applying to different business competitions. They proved me wrong.<\/p>\n There really are no right or wrong answers in my courses. <\/strong><\/p>\n For most of the problems I pose, there is more than one answer. That\u2019s what real engineering is, especially design. Grading is hard because you\u2019re focusing more on the process, and whether the student can present it well, rather than if they got the right answer.<\/p>\n Keeping in touch with alumni is great pride and great fun. It\u2019s helpful and inspiring to our students.<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the frustrations of the early days of the program was not having graduates in the real world we could pull back to speak to our undergraduates. We have that now. The graduates are in the real world, but they\u2019ve sat in the students\u2019 seats. We do a lot of Skype sessions, and some of them have resulted in jobs for our students.<\/p>\n Do you want to hear a funny story?<\/strong><\/p>\n My mom was a middle-school teacher in Kenmore, a suburb of Buffalo. When Goergen Hall opened in 2007, I brought my parents. My mom saw the Bob Goergen sign. She said, \u201cHmmm, I wonder if he grew up in Kenmore.\u201d I said \u201cI have no idea, but let\u2019s go look at his plaque.\u201d Sure enough, Bob Goergen was in my mom\u2019s middle school class a million years ago. She remembered the name. She said, \u201cHe was a nice boy.\u201d I often think of that when I\u2019m looking out at my students. You never know who\u2019s in the classroom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Amy Lerner, associate professor of biomedical engineering is among one of the 2016 recipients of the Goergen Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":672,"featured_media":185892,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[486,18742,18632],"class_list":["post-185852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-awards","tag-department-of-biomedical-engineering","tag-hajim-school-of-engineering-and-applied-sciences"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n