Inspiring Innovation; New Short Talks Features Karl Schubert

Hardin Young: Welcome to Short Talks from the Hill, a podcast from the University of Arkansas. My name is Hardin Young and I’m a writer here at the university. Today I’d like to welcome Karl Schubert, a professor of practice and associate director of the Data Science Program for the College of Engineering, the Sam M. Walton College of Business, and the J. William Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences. Schubert also chaired a sub-committee that brought together leaders from secondary and post-secondary schools, the Arkansas Department of Education and relevant industries to update the state’s high school computer science curriculum. Karl, welcome to Short Talks.

Karl Schubert: Thank you very much, Hardin, and I’m very pleased to be here.

HY: First, you’re a professor of practice. Can you talk a little bit about your background and how it relates to your title?

KS: Yes, well, professor of practice means that I’ve spent the majority of my career outside academia. And, as a matter of fact, I am a graduate of the University of Arkansas. I got a bachelor’s degree in engineering – chemical engineering – here and a master’s degree at the University of Kentucky and a PhD in engineering here. And then I went into industry and spent 35 years in industry working in various roles with large companies and small companies and doing some startups. And then some consulting, and ultimately I had the opportunity to come back here and do some things here with innovation and data science.

HY: You say you had the opportunity to come back here. Can you could talk a little bit how that opportunity came together?

KS: Yes, so I’ve been on the engineering Dean’s Advisory Council for about 12 years, and about six years ago or seven years ago I headed up a subgroup. Before this, before I was on the faculty, I headed up a subgroup because we had commented to the dean that we felt that some of the students that were graduating weren’t getting – weren’t really ready to get into innovative things in companies, in being able to be self-starters and apply critical thinking like we thought they should. So, Dean English, at the time, asked me to head up a group to take a look at that and so we did. We spent about six months studying and interviewing faculty members and students and companies, and ended up coming up with a set of recommendations. And after we presented that at an Advisory Council meeting shortly thereafter, Deans English and Waller approached me about becoming a consultant and putting together an innovation program that would involve students from the College of Engineering and the College of Business. And a couple of the elements that we had there were focused on a few things: applying critical thinking, bringing innovation back into the curriculum, making sure that students weren’t just given a toolbox to work with. And fixing one of the problems, hopefully before it starts, that I’ve had to fix in industry lot, which was having engineering and business students realize that they need each other before they learned they didn’t like each other.

HY: I think this leads into my next question. As we noted in your introduction, you’re also associate director of the data science program for three different colleges. You’ve already mentioned two of them. How did that come together?

KS: Well, that was really interesting. It came together based on the three deans talking with companies out there about our computer science, computer engineering, various technical programming type degrees that we had, and the executives from the major corporations, and actually some of the startups in our state, we’re telling the deans that there was something missing here, and they described something that really ended up being data science. So they came back and were getting together and I was talking with them about some of the work I had done, and they said, “Well, you know, we’d like to go ahead and start a data science program here, and we’d like you to lead the team to do that.” So I transitioned from working only on innovation to actually working on putting this together. So we formed the team to do it. The key elements were that it would be a collaboration of the three colleges in programming, as opposed to a department, and we have various concentrations to focus on different areas that would involve all three colleges. And I had the advantage at the time, as a matter of fact, of being employed by the deans and because I also come from the outside, even though I’m very familiar, obviously, with the university, I was viewed by the faculty as what I called non-denominational. You know, that is, that I wasn’t in a department specifically. I was working for three deans, and so I didn’t have any particular favoritism to any particular department or any particular college. And it turned out that as we formed the team, it was very collaborative. In fact, I would say it’s probably the most collaborative, collegial team I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve been told by the faculty that it’s probably the most unusual collaboration they’ve ever been involved in because it was exactly those things: collegial and collaborative, and we all focused on trying to put together a really good program.

HY: It was collegial, but it was also, I think worth noting, you guys worked in a pretty quick timeline.

KS: We did, yeah, it’s kind of interesting there too, because of course from the outside, we formed an Advisory Council very early because we wanted to get industry input on it and it was pretty straightforward to do. I’ve run them in businesses a lot, in companies I’ve been in and started them. So, yeah, interestingly enough from the outside, it looked like it took us forever to do it. From the inside it was about two years from the time we started to the time we actually had it going through the process, which was considered phenomenally fast, as you alluded to, particularly given that we had three colleges and had to go through the approvals of all three colleges’ programs, and then through the university.  We did do a few strategic things. We were very fortunate to have the governor’s chief of staff be one of our Advisory Council members and one of the board of trustees members be an Advisory Council member, so that really helped. Because when it came time to go through the approvals, we had people who were aware of the program and did not have to start from zero. Given it was a fairly complicated program going through the process, I think that was very, very helpful. They also provided great input to us on the program too. So it was helpful from that point of view.

HY: You were part of an interdisciplinary team that brought in a grant of just under a million dollars to support low income students interested in studying innovation in the STEM fields. Tell us a little bit about that grant.

KS: Yes, well that that was part of that process of putting the innovation program together I mentioned at the very beginning. I’ve been very involved with bringing engineering students into innovation. One of the other projects I created as part of my innovation work was the honors innovation experience which brought engineering and business students together in the same class in a project-based, active-learning class for first year students. So I thought at that point in time when I created it – I felt that this could be useful for non-honor students also. So part of the original design was to do that, and so I decided to apply for this NSF grant and compete for it to, to really go after underrepresented students, students that have great innovation potential but don’t necessarily have the opportunities. And so that was the impetus for it.

Now it turned out that I’ve been involved in another program, the Engineering Career Awareness Program, ECAP, which you may be familiar with. It turned out that the ECAP program was designed by my sister and when she was looking for some investors for it to… well, someone invest in it to convince the people like Walmart to invest in it and other companies. She asked me to do that. So I actually created an endowment to fund it initially so she could go get other funders. And so this is kind of in line with that. It’s expanding from just engineering to expanding that innovation kind-of-thing into the other STEM fields outside engineering, because there are plenty of those, you know, obviously in Fulbright, certainly there is plenty of them, which is really good.

So we’ve got a really good mix of students in the first cohort. We have 13 students in the first one. We’re hoping to expand that to probably about 20 next year, and then a few more after that. So, so far so good. We started off with an intersession this summer where in two weeks we gave them a crash course on innovation and how to be a good student at the university. We partnered with the Honors College and their Path Program to do that. I should add that our one of our associate deans in engineering who runs the ECAP program is also on the PI team for that grant, and so is my sister, as one of the experts in that area. So then we have Honors College faculty who are also on the grant. So we have a really good mix of folks who have experience in this area, and I bring the industrial experience to it, the innovation program experience, and we also are therefore bringing in industry experts. And I’m actually taking the students on a field trip every semester to go see innovation and action in real companies.

HY: That’s great. You mentioned her twice. Let’s name her. Who is your sister?

KS: Oh, Dr. Carol Gattis.

HY: Carol Gattis.

KS: She’s semi-retired from the Honors College as associate dean a few years ago. Semi-retired is what I call it, and I believe she started the honors program at the College of Engineering.

HY: So with this grant, most of the money goes to scholarships, but is there a research component to it?

KS: There is, actually. The research element here is – and we actually have IRB approval – to survey the entire student body on a set of innovation things. We created a research component that has to do with determining innovation in students or innovation proclivity, innovation experience, inclination to innovation. And so we actually have issued this survey to the students in this grant – pre-talking to them about innovation. We also gave it to the students in the honors innovation experience prior to the time we started talking about innovation and we are about to, in the next week or two, submit it to the entire student body at the university, and we will actually then monitor before and after times in each of the semesters of the innovation experience classes. And then we’ll follow the students throughout their career at the university to see how it changes over time. So we’re basically looking to see if there are things that we can do on interventions to increase the innovation capabilities of our students at the university, beyond just these students, ultimately.  So that’s the research element here: looking for factors that we can do as interventions and being able to measure those interventions for improvement in innovation.

HY: OK, I’ve got one last question for you. What is the book you’ve read recently that you enjoyed – your field or not in your field, just something that caught your attention?

KS: Well, can I offer two books?

HY: Sure.

KS: OK, one them is the Art of the Long View [by Peter Schwartz], and it has to do with looking at – strategically looking at – things kind of going forward. I recommend that one. The other book is Finding Your own North Star [by Martha Beck], and it was on one of the Oprah book lists, as it turns out. I think that was really good, and I actually use that not only for people, but I actually use that for organizations, for helping them find their way and figure out what to do or not to.

HY: Karl Schubert, thanks for coming on Short Talks.

KS: You’re welcome, thank you for the opportunity. It’s a real pleasure.

Matt McGowan: Music for Short Talks from the Hill was written and performed by local musician Ben Harris. For more information and additional podcasts, visit Arkansas Research, that’s arkansasresearch.uark.edu, the home of science and research news at the University of Arkansas.