Skill-Building

Things a Physicist Rarely Talks About (Grow PoLS)
On October 25-26, 2020, Rice University hosted the Grow PoLS Virtual Workshop: Growing Equity, Inclusion and Diversity for the Physics of Living Systems. The purpose of this PoLS (Physics of Living Systems) workshop was to grow the ecosystem of physics by recognizing the systemic barriers that exist in STEM fields at all education and career levels, by building alliances, and by sharing best practices to overcome these systemic barriers.

Entrepreneurship Minor, McCombs School of Business
As part of his PTF Initiative, Luis Martins founded the Entrepreneurship Minor within the McCombs School's Rosenthal Department of Management. The Entrepreneurship Minor is available to all undergraduate students at UT Austin, and develops entrepreneurial mindsets and skillsets that equip students to have impact on organizations and society as startup founders or as employees in established organizations.

Additional Initiative Funding (COLA)
PTF Julia Mickenberg worked with her Graduate Assistant and collaborator, Ricky Shear (Department of English), on a survey of UT liberal arts alumni aiming to find out what alumni valued about their liberal arts degrees and how they felt those degrees limited them. The College of Liberal Arts provided Mickenberg with additional funding in order to broaden the scope of the survey from department-specific alumni to the entire College.

Engineering Sentences at a Writing Center: A Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration (College Composition and Communication Regional Conference)
D'Arcy Randall gave a virtual presentation about the pilot program developed as part of her PTF Initiative at the College Composition and Communication Regional Conference at the University of Southern California on Dec. 19, 2020.

Engineering Sentences through the Texas Snowpocalypse: Results of a collaboration between a University Writing Center and an Engineering Writing Course (CCCC)
D'Arcy Randall gave a co-authored presentation about the program developed as part of her PTF Initiative at the Conference on College Composition and Communication on February 16, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois, themed "Doing Hope in Desperate Times." The presentation was part of a session featuring Writing Centers titled "Cross-Disciplinary Collaborations to Promote Transfer and Self-Efficacy," which was among hundreds of sessions of varied topics, formats, and scholarly approaches for over 1000 attendees.

Write from the Start in Engineering: Mixed-Methods Results of a Collaboration between a First-Year Biomedical Engineering Class and a University Writing Center (ASEE)
PTF D'Arcy Randall delivered a co-authored presentation at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 26, 2023.

Bridging Rhetoric and Engineering (IPCC)
“Bridging Rhetoric and Engineering: Qualitative Results from a Writing Center Program to Improve Engineering Undergraduate Writing,” Proceedings from IEEE ProComm, 2024. Pittsburgh, PA (July 14-17, 2024). I delivered this co-authored conference paper at the IEEE ProComm conference. See the link for the paper.