Department of Technology

ENG 130 - Introduction to Engineering

Fall 2001

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Setting Goals

"Success: the progressive realization of a worthy goal" - Earl Nightengale

Goals

I refer to goals as long-term ambitions to complete tasks or achieve results

• Goals typically are somewhat open-ended. You may give a date for completion, but may not have specific plans for how to achieve them.
  
• "Worthy" goals address both your potential and your dreams. While it may be someone’s goal to "learn to burp the alphabet", such a goal is not worth your time to follow through. As a student at MSUM, you have shown the potential to graduate from college, contribute to society, and develop a rewarding career. Choose goals that challenge you, that will help you become the person you want.

Your goals may be implicit or explicit. Implicit goals are the goals you state by the actions you take. Explicit goals are those you declare for yourself. You don’t need to tell someone your goals to make them explicit - you can simply write them down. I recommend that you do this. Think through the goals you’d like to accomplish and write them down. That process makes you focus on the outcomes you hope for, and decide what goals are most important to you. As you work towards them, review your list regularly to decide if you’re on track, and if they still seem appropriate for you.

Each of you has indicated an implicit goal - "I want to become an engineer". Why?

• Money
• Prestige
• Accomplishment
• Life-long career
• New opportunities - medicine, space, communications

What does it take to become an successful engineer?

1. B.S. degree from an ABET-accredited school
2. Licensure
1. EIT exam at graduation
2. 4 years work experience
3. P.E. exam
3. Communication skills
4. Ability to work in teams
5. Experience - co-ops, etc.

Note how this becomes a progressive goal - it takes time to get the degree, earn the experience, and move up in responsibility as an engineer. You succeed in this goal by accomplishing each step - you don’t need to wait 5-10 years to feel that you’ve been successful.

Objectives

Having defined the goal in general terms, you should set some short-term goals, with more definite limits on what you plan to accomplish, and when. I refer to these as objectives.

A good rule of thumb is that any objective should follow the acronym SMART. They should be

Specific - they should state exactly the item to be accomplished. While the statement "I will graduate from college" is a reasonable goal, a better objective would be, "I will graduate from UND with a degree in Civil Engineering in May of 2005."

Measurable - you should be able to quantify your success. An objective to "make a lot of money" is not measurable, but you can measure your success with "earn $50,000"

Ambitious - choose an objective that you will have to work to achieve. There’s no point in selecting objectives that will be accomplished even if you do nothing.

Realistic - balance your ambitious dream with a dose of reality. It might be ambitious for a graduate engineer to earn $50,000, but its unrealistic to expect to start at $250,000.

Timed - Name a date and time when this objective will be accomplished.

Strategies

Once you’ve named the objective, consider how you will accomplish them. Are there methods which will help you forward your ambitions? These methods I refer to as strategies.

For example, if your objective was to "earn a 3.00 GPA for fall semester", you might ask yourself what steps you could take to make that happen. They might include:

• Study. You stand a better chance of getting good grades if you study regularly. Where will you study? When? How much time will you set aside for which classes?
• Participate in class. You’ll get more out of class if you listen, ask questions, and share in class discussions. To do that, you need to be ready, read assignments, and think as you go.
• Go to class.
• Do well on tests. You can help yourself in this area by studying regularly rather than cramming. You can also take part in the College Survival Workshop on Test Taking.
• Set priorities. Which classes will contribute more to a higher GPA? (a four credit D will do more damage than a 2 credit A can overcome) In which classes could you raise your grade with a little more work? What other classes might suffer if you shift your time to those?

When you’ve identified the strategies that will help you succeed, write them down as objectives for the quarter, the month, the week, and the day. Succeeding in an objective to study regularly each week will contribute to your success in raising your grade point, and in graduating from college. Similarly, each of our short-term objectives should contribute to your longer-term objectives and to your over-all goals. If you find yourself pursuing a short-term objective that really doesn’t fit your goals, ask yourself why. You may be surprised to find a new goal that, until now, had been implicit.