For our "History & Philosophy of Engineering Education" class at Purdue, we're supposed to make videos that represent our vision of the future of engineering education. My team's still pulling together our magnum opus, but I drafted up rough sketches for my portion and wanted to share a bit. Meet "Alex," a student admissions vlogger for the (fictional) Donovan College set several decades in the future, far enough that SATs are an amusing historical artifact, South Africa is the hotbed of software innovation, and Harry Potter is "classic children's literature."

Basically, if my grand-niece were to take up engineering... what might her blog look like? ("Wait... Lola Mel, you used cell phones to talk with people? And did you really fly in airplanes?")

So here's the first post of school year by "Alex," a Legal Engineering major at Donovan, explaining her internship classes and why she wants to do a term abroad in South Africa even if it might mean she takes 3 whole years to graduate.

Another post from a few months later, wherein Alex explains what to do if your library doesn't have a fab center to print the parts for the design challenge and recounts a story Dr. Nathan told her class about the way people used to apply to college before portfolios were widespread... there was this test called the Standardized... Academic? Achievement? Standardized Something-That-Starts-With-The-Letter-A Test, and people got assigned numbers when they took it. Weird.

The audio quality is probably terrible; my microphone is about to give up the ghost. They're drafts! They're drafts! They're not meant to be good! I did transcribe them, so you can turn on English subtitles and view the interactive transcript (mmm, technology and accessibility). But in a nutshell, this is my lo-fi glimpse into the future.

Oh. And in the event I do end up having a grand-niece named Alex, and she ever watches this, then... er... hi! Greetings from the crazy young version of your crazy old aunt.