NMSU Ron Seidel Engineering Leadership Institute explores six senses of a Whole New Mind

The first cohort of 10 students selected for the leadership institute are engaged in a discussion of Daniel Pink’s right brain senses – design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. In an effort to develop these senses and become engineering leaders of tomorrow, the students selected one or more of these six senses and contextualized them with their learning experiences and current public health crisis. Honors College Dean Miriam Chaiken participated as a guest at these discussions, and Tony McClary, Engineering Learning Communities director; Tony Garcia, associate dean of academics; and I, served as moderators. We are amazed at how each one of us contextualized these senses, and together we learned a great deal about how crises become opportunities to a true leader. Our students dwelled on such difficult senses as meaning. Story-telling was not a challenge to this group. Bringing playful attitudes to what we do in engineering, and orchestrating a symphony of project components in a design that’s both functional and aesthetic are the right-brain leadership dimensions that we explored together.