Category: Essential Abilities

Michigan Tech Essential Education Seminars prepare students for Success

Published September 10, 2025

Starting college is a pivotal moment, and at Michigan Tech, we’ve designed a first-semester experience to help new students navigate it successfully. The Michigan Tech Seminar in Essential Education, offered through a wide variety of introductory courses, helps students not only get acclimated but also chart their academic journey, practice reflection, and build a sense of community. This isn’t just another class; it’s an integrated experience with core modules that are adapted by instructors to fit the unique needs of different majors.

The seminar is built on three key pillars:

Essential Education: these modules help students understand the “why” behind their education. By introducing Michigan Tech’s Essential Abilities, students are prompted to reflect on our key learning outcomes and their own strengths and areas for growth. This self-assessment is more than an exercise; it’s a tool for creating a unique academic plan. Students are encouraged to explore a wide range of opportunities early on, including Essential Ed minors, undergraduate research opportunities, study away programs, and student organizations, helping them set concrete goals and map out a pathway to achieve them.

Husky Folio: Michigan Tech’s pedagogical approach to helping students recognize, reflect on, and collect evidence of their learning, is a powerful tool for career readiness. The Husky Folio modules introduce students to the practice of documenting and reflecting on their learning. Through a series of assignments, students learn how to use our Husky Folio platform to tell the story of their academic and personal growth. This is valuable practice not only for future classes but also for preparing them to articulate their skills and experiences in a job interview.

Husky Life: The Husky Life modules focus on crucial aspects of student success: academics, community, and wellbeing. These modules connect students with vital campus resources and encourage them to build relationships with peers, faculty, and staff. Instructors can tailor assignments to fit specific professional development needs, with many sections focusing on resume building and departmental networking. The modules also address key life skills, with instructors able to choose topics like time management, stress reduction, and coping with loneliness, ensuring a holistic approach to student wellness.

Because we recognize that transfer students have unique needs, a seminar specifically designed for these students was also developed. Evidence suggests that a significant number of our transfer students may face academic challenges, with nearly half having a GPA of 2.5 or lower (about 33% of our total Michigan Tech undergraduate student population have a GPA below 2.5). We know that having a sense of belonging on campus contributes to academic success for students. (https://www.ihep.org/publication/student-experience-and-belonging-strong-outcomes/) Through the Michigan Transfer Seminar, we are working to build community among new transfer students while also helping them learn about campus resources and plan for their future, ensuring they have the support they need to succeed.

The success of the seminar is a testament to strong cross-unit collaboration. Developed by faculty from diverse academic disciplines as well as student affairs staff, this partnership has created a seamless introduction to campus life, beginning with summer orientation and continuing through the fall semester. This collaborative effort also resulted in a $650,000 State of Michigan MiLEAP College Success grant, which will support continued development of the modules and innovative teaching practices over the next three years.

The seminar also serves as an incubator for new ideas in curriculum design. The shared modules are designed to be both structured and flexible, allowing them to be effective in courses ranging from small seminars to large lectures and in subjects as varied as Engineering Analysis, First Year Arts Seminar, Explorations in Computing, and Natural Resource Professional. This adaptability ensures that students across all disciplines receive a high-quality, relevant experience.

You can learn more about the shared seminar modules and other seminar-related programming through the “Essential Education Resource Hub for Instructors” in Canvas <Essential Ed Resource Hub for Instructors> Courses that serve as seminar courses can be found on our Michigan Tech Essential Education website <Program Requirements | Essential Education | Michigan Tech>.

What’s New with the Essential Education Minors?

Published September 10, 2025

By Stephen Patchin

Our new Essential Education minors, launching this fall, are built directly into the Essential Education curriculum. They offer a unique opportunity to explore a specific theme through a variety of disciplinary perspectives. By design, they are a seamless addition to a student’s degree, allowing them to broaden their perspective and complement their major without adding to their credit load.

Each Essential Ed minor allows students to engage with a variety of perspectives and disciplines, incorporating courses from specific categories in the curriculum. These include a communication-intensive course, an intercultural competency course, and a selection of courses from the humanities, arts, social sciences, and business (SHAPE). A key feature is the flexibility for students to customize their coursework within the minor’s theme, allowing them to align their learning with their personal and career goals. The Essential Education Curriculum page <https://www.mtu.edu/essential-ed/overview/curriculum/> includes more specific information about the requirements each minor must meet. As part of their minor pathway, students will create an ePortfolio through Husky Folio, allowing them to reflect on and integrate their learning journey.

We are excited to announce that the following Essential Ed minors are in the final stages of approval:

AI Ethics
Creativity & Expression
Economics & Society
Entrepreneurship
Human-Centered Design
Leadership
Population Health
Public Policy & Law
Sustainability Studies

Stay tuned for a deeper dive into each of these themes in the coming weeks. In the meantime, get a sneak peek into the vision behind these minors by watching this video: <Michigan Tech’s Essential Education Minors – Launch 2025>.

Essential Education Employment Task Force Holds First Meeting Focusing on Essential Abilities

Published September 27, 2024

By Stephen Patchin

The newly established Essential Education Employment Task Force, composed of organizations that have been long-standing recruiters at Michigan Tech, recently held its first meeting. Many of these recruiters are Michigan Tech alumni, united by a shared passion for helping shape programming that equips our students for success—not only in their first jobs post-graduation but throughout their entire careers.

This task force will play a critical role in ensuring that we clearly communicate the value, accomplishments, and learning outcomes tied to Essential Education. Their input will help us continue developing programs that foster the Essential Abilities our students need to thrive in today’s workforce.

We would like to extend our thanks to the Essential Education Employer Task Force members for collaborating with our faculty and staff to refine and strengthen the components of Michigan Tech’s Essential Education initiative. The task force includes representatives from Stellantis, Gerdau, Michigan Scientific, Kimberly-Clark, Greenheck, Nexteer, Caterpillar, Plexus, General Motors, and Security Vitals.

The task force’s mission is to help us establish effective communication channels with recruiting organizations, ensuring they understand the Essential Abilities our students are developing through these experiences. As the task force continues its work, we will focus on building engaging learning opportunities that align with the skills and attributes these employers seek in their future employees.

What are the Essential Abilities developed throughout the Essential Education programming?

Michigan Tech’s current General Education program has 8 undergraduate student learning goals, of which 6 are used in the assessment of General Education. These 6 USLGs include 41 performance criteria. Our new Essential Education program reduces these to 4 undergraduate student learning goals with 12 performance criteria that we call Essential Abilities. This reduction aligns us with the number of learning goals and performance criteria at peer institutions and simplifies assessment within essential education. Below are the 4 learning goals and associated Essential Abilities defined.

Learning Goal: Think Critically

Question Assumptions: Students identify and evaluate stated and unstated assumptions underlying an experience, question, problem, or statement.

Evaluate Information: Students identify and evaluate relevant information to address an experience, question, problem, or statement.

Analyze Ethical Implications: Students recognize and analyze ethical, questions, and problems.

Learning Goal: Communicate

Communicate Quantitatively: Students interpret quantitative data and choose appropriate methods and formulas to communicate findings.

Communicate Contextually: Students choose communication formats and methods appropriate for the context, purpose and audience.

Foster Collaboration: Students communicate with others to develop, distribute, and complete tasks; seek and incorporate the perspectives of others; and communicate main ideas and results in team settings.

Learning Goal: Adapt

Reflect: students review prior learning (and experiences) to consider significance of experiences inside and outside the classroom as well as plan next steps for learning and growth.

Welcome Challenge: students demonstrate willingness to try new things, persevere in the face of obstacles, learn from mistakes, and appreciate learning and growth in addition to achievement.

Explore Diverse Perspectives: students demonstrate awareness of their own norms and biases as well as existing diversity within and beyond their own social and cultural group(s).

Learning Goal: Contribute/Transform

Engage in Civic Life: students develop the knowledge, skills, and motivation to make a difference in the civic life of their communities.

Innovate Solutions: students apply an appropriate process to design, evaluate, and/or implement a strategy to answer an open-ended question or achieve a desired goal.

Create: students compose novel (or unique variations of existing) works, ideas, questions, formats, or products and synthesize their ideas with those of others.

So why make the change to these four goals and their aligned essential abilities?

The shift to the Essential Abilities in Michigan Tech’s new Essential Education program was driven by the need for a more streamlined, impactful approach to student learning. This move allows us to focus more effectively on the skills and competencies that matter most to employers and help students thrive not only in their first jobs but throughout their careers. The Essential Abilities emphasize critical thinking, communication, global awareness, and lifelong learning—key competencies for navigating an increasingly complex and interconnected world.

Think Critically
The ability to think critically about complex issues is vital for all students. While the disciplinary context and subject matter will vary, the ability to carefully consider assumptions, available information, and the ethical dimensions of problems and proposed solutions are key skills. Collectively, these skills help students make sense of large amounts of information, detect and avoid fallacies, facilitate dialogue, attend to diverse perspectives, and cultivate a deeper awareness of how to connect and synthesize culture, social, economic, and scientific ideas.

Communicate
The challenges of the 21st Century require the ability to communicate information and ideas intentionally, strategically, and responsibly – across a range of audiences, disciplines, and media – using a variety of modes (written, spoken, quantitative). Such communication required attention to the diversity of contexts (global, local, intercultural). Skillfulness in this area involves the ability to connect with others through interpersonal and group communication skills.

Adapt
Working and living in a diverse and rapidly changing technological society requires skills and mindsets that support lifelong learning, personal and professional growth, agility, and resilience. It is important that students are able and willing to take appropriate personal and intellectual risks, reflect on their own performance (successes and failures), and consider diverse perspectives that may evolve over time.

Contribute/Transform
A new frontier is emerging where the solutions to social problems will be found in a rapidly changing world where science, technology, humanities, arts, and social sciences intersect. In this environment, those who seek to make significant contributions to society must engage with multiple perspectives and use well-developed creative thinking skills to form new ideas that form their actions. It is essential for students to develop, share, and inspire creativity – such as pursuing opportunities in the creative arts, collaborating to find innovative and ethical solutions, and contributing to their communities and the broader world.

Michigan Technological University’s Essential Education Initiative will be fully implemented in Fall 2025. This forward-thinking curriculum will prepare our students for careers that don’t exist today. Michigan Tech’s Essential Ed further aligns our undergraduate curriculum with business workforce needs, further enhancing career opportunities for our students.