Award-winning paper from Wake Forest Engineering connects effective communication skills to character

Effective engineers should be effective communicators. But communication skills can also be a way to cultivate character, promote ethical development, and encourage more professional conduct. That’s the conclusion of a new award-winning paper written by collaborators from the Wake Forest Department of Engineering, the Program for Leadership and Character, and former engineers who teamed up to create a series of seminars for students. Over the summer, that paper, “Educating the Whole Engineer: Leveraging Communication Skills to Cultivate Ethical Leadership Character,” was honored as the Best Paper in the Ethics Division at the 2024 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference and Exposition. “[Their] paper focused on dimensions of engineering leadership aside from technical know-how alone,” says Rockwell Clancy, the Ethics Division Chair at ASEE. “It highlighted the interrelated roles of communication and ethics in engineering leadership.”  

The paper’s authors were Founding Department Chair Olga Pierrakos, Senior Research Scholar in the Program for Leadership and Character in the Professional Schools Jessica Koehler, and former electrical engineers Andy and Farnoosh Brock. of Prolific Living Inc. Farnoosh Brock says her experience as an engineer provided her with the ability to identify the communication problems that new engineers may experience. “I went into the workforce exactly the way they go into the workforce where they’re driven, ambitious, hard workers… and I thought that was all it took,” she says. However, she found that she and other engineers would become disillusioned after years of running into communication problems. Some, like Farnoosh, left their careers. “Look at the problems we have to solve in this world,” Farnoosh says. “We don’t want our engineers to leave the STEM fields prematurely.” After she left, Farnoosh went to her mentors and studied how to effectively improve communication skills. Then, she teamed up with Andy to design an entire company, Prolific Living Inc., that was built on teaching what she’d learned to engineering schools around the country .

When Farnoosh Brock first met Olga Pierrakos, a paper was not the end goal. Instead, the two wanted to bolster Wake Forest’s engineering curriculum. Pierrakos felt there were gaps in the department’s guidance on communication skills and leadership, so she met with Farnoosh Brock, who had been coaching professionals on these topics and more. Pierrakos felt Farnoosh’s experience as an engineer and her work as a leadership coach would be instrumental in supporting the Wake Forest engineering community. Together, they sought to create an eight-session Communication Seminar Series where Farnoosh, with the research and developmental support of her partner Andy, would cover 10 topics related to self-improvement and communication skills. Pierrakos and Koehler recorded the series to see what insights they might find. It only took the first session for Pierrakos to see the benefits of the seminar. “I think at some point I went to Jessica, and I was like, ‘Did you see what I saw? She’s talking about virtues,’” she says. From that point on, Pierrakos tasked Koehler with mapping out the virtues that Farnoosh was addressing in her sessions. 


The department found that integrative and experiential learning were the best methods of developing their students’ understanding of the topics. Farnoosh utilized sample scenarios to link character values like courage, empathy, and curiosity to effective communication skills. In the sample scenarios, students were guided through challenging situations they would experience in their careers. One scenario explored the ethical choice of challenging a “no” from the boss in a diplomatic and effective way. For each session, students completed surveys and participated in reflective discussion forums which were later used as data to explore evidence of students’ character development. The surveys captured anxieties before the series and some more optimistic attitudes following each session. Koehler says the discussion forums conveyed distinct development in the students’ character, “[The sessions were] really helping them become more self-aware, and gave them the courage and the situational awareness to recognize the kinds of situations [they] might find [themselves] in.” Additionally, the forums showed that students were actively cultivating the aforementioned character virtues as well as intellectual humility and resilience. Andy Brock felt this confidence stemmed directly from the integrative learning the scenarios provided. “They are given a workplace scenario to tackle and they step into the role play, which takes a lot of courage but has immense value so that they can do well when they face the scenario as a working engineer,” he says, “That’s what we need to teach: the real skills.” 

After a year of collecting data, Pierrakos suggested that everyone should write a paper on their findings. “Traditionally character has been positioned from sort of the virtue ethic lens, and so it has been positioned on the engineering ethics side,” Pierrakos says. “We saw an opportunity to connect it to the more professional skills that are also essential for engineers, in this case communication.” The paper was submitted to the ASEE and reviewed in multiple divisions, but ultimately received a reward in the ethics division. The idea of educating the whole engineer through strengthening their communication skills started with seminars aimed exclusively at Wake Forest Engineering students and faculty. However, now through the creation and submission of this paper to the ASEE, universities across the nation can cite this paper as a resource for how they further develop their own curriculums. The point is to empower future engineers so that they can lead healthy and successful careers in their own right. “We need them in there,” Farnoosh Brock says. “We need them fulfilled and happy and joyful, and still doing the work.”

This achievement was made possible thanks to the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network of the Kern Family Foundation who have funded the work in Wake Forest Engineering since 2018 and the National Science Foundation who support Pierrakos and this research.