The Tagliatela College’s Innovative Project to Integrate Technical Communication Habits (PITCH) is Thriving

When Julia Benitez started in the Tagliatela College of Engineering, the Project to Integrate Technical Communication Habits (PITCH) program didn’t yet exist. "We’d have to write technical memos and many of us were lost," Benitez says. "We’d put a lot of effort in and wouldn’t get the grades we were expecting. So we asked our professors for a program to teach us those technical writing skills and the University listened."

Developed by a team of faculty members across the Tagliatela College, the program is integrated across all levels and engineering disciplines. Benitez became a PITCH peer assistant in her senior year, working with Judy Randi, professor of education and PITCH coordinator, helping other students write succinct technical memos and learning a great deal about technical communication along the way.

Today as a supplier quality engineer at MacDermid Alpha, working in the electronics and semi-conductor industry, Benitez says she uses the skills she developed through PITCH every day. She can turn mountains of data into a tight, clear technical report. "These are very busy people. The semiconductor industry moves very fast, and people are doing five things at a time in a normal day," she says. "They are very happy to receive an organized, concise report with a small table that summarizes everything."

That gets at the very heart of PITCH’s purpose, Randi says. "Throughout all coursework, professors give students writing assignments reflective of what they’ll do when they go out into their engineering careers," she says.

PITCH begins in a student’s first year with a one-credit online course where students learn basic technical communication skills and work on exercises to help them write organized, succinct, precise technical memos. Professors assign technical memos throughout students’ first and second years. In the junior year lab courses, the focus is on writing lab reports and students can access online resources including detailed lab report guidelines developed by Tagliatela College faculty. As they prepare for the Senior Design projects, seniors refer to design proposal and report guidelines, presentation approaches, writing samples and other resources available online.

"They are very happy to receive an organized, concise report with a small table that summarizes everything."Julia Benitez '18

The program began five years ago when the Tagliatela College secured an $185,500, three-year grant from the Davis Educational Foundation to provide students with strong technical communication skills. "Our goal was to emphasize professional communication skills across all engineering and computer science disciplines," Dean Ronald Harichandran says. "Employers want engineering graduates to be able to communicate clearly. Strong communications skills give our graduates an advantage in the marketplace."

The program has grown since the pilot implementation of the online course with 78 students. Now every first year student in the Tagliatela College of Engineering takes the online course, which has formally introduced technical communication to more than 300 students within the last three years. Randi says faculty members report marked improvement in technical writing. A recent study she did with an engineering professor and an English professor comparing students’ technical memos in their first and second year confirmed that, finding "almost 100 percent improvement."

"Faculty buy-in was strong from the start," Harichandran says and that continues. Randi says she is continually invited into engineering courses to work with students and to meet with faculty to look at student benchmarks. Faculty continue to add to the online resources available to students. "It’s just wonderful to work together as a team," Randi says.

Brittany Darnaud, a junior chemical engineering major and PITCH peer assistant, says students often initially struggle with organization and concision. "In high school we mostly write English reports and essays and, at first, students use three different words to say `calculate’. The hardest part is transitioning from the English essay to the technical memo," says Darnaud. But with practice, Randi says, those skills improve.

Darnaud says taking the course and being a peer assistant helped sharpen her writing and presentation skills and that has made her more marketable as she applies for internships. "They all wanted to know about my technical communication skills, and I was able to talk about what I do," she says.

Adds Randi, "Every report on the skills people need in the workplace—across a very wide range of careers—emphasizes communication. The work that engineers do improves the world we live in and so it is especially critical that engineers have the skills to communicate their important work to others.