When UChicago engineering undergrads Akash Bindal and Zubin Kumar prep their regular room at the William Eckhardt Research Center every Sunday morning, the first thing they do is rearrange the chairs.
They move them into small clusters turned inward to facilitate more personal group conversation and collaboration. This is just one of the many deliberate ways the student-run, student-created Collaborative Learning in Molecular Engineering (CLIME) course engineers an environment in which molecular engineering undergraduates learn and grow together.
CLIME is an optional, zero-credit course for molecular engineering undergraduates to workshop tough topics, talk out problems they’re having trouble with and generally navigate life and lab at a top-tier global engineering program. Participants meet up to learn from undergraduate mentors who are ahead of them in their studies and university experiences.
It’s an opportunity for students to grapple with and comprehend challenging topics without the immediate pressure of tests and homework, and to create community within a rigorous academic program.
“Because the questions engineers deal with are so intricate, students need to break them down,” Bindal said. “It’s just inherent to the engineering process. That's why engineering lends itself really well to collaboration.”
Breaking down barriers
The work for each CLIME session begins with a team of undergraduate “problem writers” creating three to four challenge problems for the class to tackle together. This often involves reaching out to PME faculty, asking what issues the students are having trouble with or what lesson plans are impending.
Once the desks are moved and the class starts, each cluster of tables has only one copy of each problem. This is another important opportunity to develop collaboration. With only one copy, students literally cannot work out the solution alone. They must hash it out with their peers, coming up with a solution together.
“We’re informed by our own experiences as students,” said Kumar, who created the CLIME course with Bindal. “We could tell when certain environments had us engaged and when certain environments didn’t.”
The mentors don’t provide the answers. Instead, they give helpful hints and content refreshers, discuss approaches and possible steps to take, help check work and create situations where the students who grasp the topic step up to the board and teach it to their peers.
“If the room is quiet, things are going wrong,” Kumar said. “If it's dead silence with people looking down and working, we know we’ve gone off course.”
Bindal and Kumar pitched CLIME to Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Director of Undergraduate Studies Mark Stoykovich in fall 2022. Stoykovich said he was impressed by both the pair and the proposal, which was in part inspired by the Department of Chemistry’s Collaborative Learning in Chemistry (CLiC) course.
“Our students come from across the world for the chance to learn from and with the world’s best minds,” Stoykovich said. “Moving hundreds or even thousands of miles to a place where you don’t know anyone can be very liberating, but it can also be intimidating. For some students, it can even be isolating. Programs like CLIME break down those barriers and help turn a group of strangers into a true learning community.”
Undergraduate engineering students are embracing the opportunity.
“CLIME allows me to be both a student and teacher depending on the situation,” said Ana Lucia Michielsen, a second year on the Quantum track.
Sunny Taylor, a third-year student on the quantum track, found CLIME to be such a vigorous learning environment that, after taking the class herself, she returned as one of the student mentors.
“CLIME was one of the reasons I stuck with the engineering major last year,” Taylor said. “I loved working in groups and solving problems together with my classmates, and we would go get lunch afterwards and became friends.”
“These seemingly small benefits – getting lunch, making friends – are vital to both the students and the UChicago engineering experience”, Stoykovich said.
“The best, most innovative collaborations come when the students get to know each other inside and outside of the lab. That’s why PME offers so many events, lectures, groups and programs to create a sense of community,” he said. “What’s special about CLIME is that it was generated by the people who know best what students need – the students themselves.”
Cultivating group curiosity
The conversations in a CLIME class can be wide-ranging. Michielsen said one of her favorite discussions came not from the example problem, but from a student’s off-the-cuff question about how the magnetic lock on the classroom door knows which side the key fob is on.
“CLIME cultivates group curiosity and an urge to learn from and bounce problems off each other,” she said.
Michielsen said she learns best when she can explore a difficult concept for its own sake, rather than as a means to solve homework.
“I find that I do my best learning when I can ask a nearly endless list of ‘what if’ questions,” she said. “Science lectures are typically rooted in particular example problems or derivations. It can be challenging to step back and see the larger significance. CLIME offers an environment in which to clarify these concepts without the typical pressure to focus solely on homework questions.”
Student mentor Trevor Hagan, a third year in the Chemical and Soft Materials track, said it is gratifying to see how CLIME creates community among cohorts, both for his cohort and the students he now helps guide.
“Most of the students in CLIME are still early into the major, and cohort cohesivity hasn’t yet fully developed,” he said. “In my experience from my time as a CLIME student, this collaboration in CLIME translates into a collaborative mindset and a good cohort dynamic for the duration of the major – not just for CLIME classes themselves.”
CLIME will face its first major test in June, when Bindal and Kumar graduate. Bindal is looking at medical school. Kumar, whom UChicago recently honored with a Diversity Leadership Award, ultimately wants to be a professor.
They have already identified new students who will lead the course in the fall. Their succession goal is to have the new leaders take full ownership of the course, continuing to adapt to what future students need.
“One reason why we've succeeded so far is the freedom and the capacity to adapt to changing situations,” Kumar said, “We've constantly been adjusting every little component of the entire program. We want to make sure that that same ethos is carried over. We don't want to provide them a rigid structure that they have to execute.”
Current second- and third-year Engineering Students can register for MENG 00214: CLIME for thermodynamics starting in early spring quarter.
Learn more about undergraduate molecular engineering at UChicago