The US News’s America’s Best Graduate Schools 2005, which came out in May, featured an article on “Dilbert’s Dilemma.” The article began as follows:

Poor Dilbert, armed with only a pocket protector and a skinny strip of a tie, this sad little engineer makes his way through a bewildering corporate workplace, socially clueless in a nerd-hostile world. Sure, he’s just a comic strip character, but in engineering education, Dilbert represents the problem. ‘He’s the stereotype that engineers have been saddled with forever,’ says Albert Gray, executive director of the National Society of Professional Engineers. . . . It’s also an image that engineering schools and professional societies across the country have been trying to combat for the past several years.

Caroline Hsu, who authored the piece, reviews what engineering schools across the country have been doing, and concludes with an upbeat assessment of the George R. Brown School of Engineering’s approach:

In 1998, Rice University received a $5 million gift to establish the Cain Project, a program dedicated to improving communication skills in engineers and scientists. Through voluntary, no-credit courses, faculty teach workshops that help grad students develop writing and presentation skills. The thesis writing workshop is perpetually over-enrolled; students don’t dare miss a session for fear of permanently losing their seat to a wait-listed candidate. And they are learning that better soft skills make better engineers.

Since the article was written, the Cain Project has expanded its workshops for graduate students and now offers a Leadership and Professional Development Program with over twenty workshops of varying lengths as well as the thesis writing groups. It’s nice to be recognized in a national guidebook to graduate education!