First-Hand:History of an ASEE Fellow - Marybeth Lima

History of an ASEE Fellow

Marybeth Lima

As of July 30, 2019

Birthplace: New Bedford, MA

Birth date: December 9, 1965

Family

I am lucky to have grown up in a family that values education, and as a child, I witnessed both my parents, at different junctures, as students. My father’s parents were born in Portugal and my father was the first in his family to graduate from college. His first undergraduate degree was in teaching; he quit teaching middle school during his first year and returned to college for an undergraduate degree in pharmacy. He worked as a pharmacist for three years before becoming bored, so he entered graduate school and completing his Doctor of Pharmacy and a 2-year postdoc before starting a faculty position when he was 39 (I was 13 at the time, my parents had recently divorced, and I lived in a different state, so I didn’t get to “see him in action” until I became a student at Ohio State, where he taught).

My parents had planned for my father to first finish his degree before my mother pursued hers; though my mom’s side of the family had been in the United States for generations, her generation was the first to attend college. Because my father’s education took much longer than expected (and then the plan changed substantially because my parents divorced), she began her undergraduate career at age 37, majoring in history, pre-law, as a single parent of two, while working full time. She graduated summa cum laude with her undergraduate degree in six years and decided to pursue a masters in library science instead of a law degree; she completed this masters when she was 45, and when I was a junior in college.

My parents are different people who had different paths in life, but even so, I am struck that what I received from them is more similar than different. Both overcame significant hurdles to succeed: My father came from an immigrant community in which almost no one graduated from high school; he was underprepared for college. My mother was a non-traditional student who worked her entire marriage to help enable the education of my father before having the opportunity to pursue higher education herself, but without the benefit of that marriage. Both left close geographical family ties and the small city in which they grew up, to pursue their goals. What I feel I’ve received from my parents is a strong dose of grit and resilience; a strong belief in and love of independent thought; and the knowledge that although life may not be fair, it is paramount to fight every single day to make it so, especially for people who live “at the margins.” What I’ve received that is different is a love of numbers from my father, and a love of words from my mother (though my father was a prolific writer as a faculty member and my mother aced math in college). I am lucky to be in a profession (engineering and academia) that places critical importance on words and numbers.

My wife has also influenced me greatly; she changed careers from law to education and has taught me a great deal about best practices in education (teaching, learning, and assessment) as she has traversed a career path from non-traditional student (masters in special education with a special emphasis on children in prison settings) to special education teacher to lead teacher to assistant principal to principal (all at an alternative school) and now to the director of special education in a parish (county) public school system.

Education

My educational career had some ups and downs. It didn’t start all that well—I essentially flunked kindergarten! I started kindergarten when I was four and was younger than my peers. I caught everything under the sun that year: chicken pox, pneumonia, common colds, etc. I missed about a third of the school days, and at the end of the year, the teacher told my parents that while I had mastered what I needed to academically to move to first grade, she felt that I hadn’t connected well with my peers from missing so much school, and she thought it would be better for me to repeat kindergarten to build my confidence and social skills. I think that parents thought I might take this hard—but they told me carefully that I hadn’t failed, they just thought it would be better for me to repeat the grade, and since we were moving to a new state, it would be a fresh start anyway. I loved kindergarten the second time around!

The best moment in my entire educational career was in the fourth grade. In grades one through three, we had done fractions in math. I really enjoyed fractions, and in fact wondered why my peers seemed to hate them so much. In fourth grade, we were introduced to decimals. When my teacher showed us how fractions converted to decimals, I got goosebumps for the first time in my life. I felt like an entire world had opened up, one with endless possibilities.

I had lived in four states by the time I had graduated from high school, and I believe that the exposure I got to different regions of the country (northeast and midwest) and different schools, though all were public, was helpful in learning to navigate the world. I graduated from high school in Buffalo, NY and went to college where my father was a faculty member at Ohio State University. We got a much-needed half off tuition, and OSU was ranked as a top 10 engineering school at the time. I started as an undecided engineering major.

By the end of my freshman year I had chosen agricultural engineering as my major; OSU had 18 different engineering majors when I was a student; I chose “ag eng” because I took a survey course of all the engineering majors, and this one seemed to be most closely linked to people and the environment. I was the only woman in my class (we were a small class of about 25 students) and at times that was lonely. I did a 6-month research experience at Oak Ridge National Lab in the summer and fall after my junior year, which put me in the class a year behind me for my senior year (I graduated in 4.5 years instead of 4 due to the research internship, but I thought that the internship was important to do because I was considering becoming a faculty member, and I knew I needed a significant research experience to make sure that I liked it). The class the year behind me had 4 women in it, out of about 32 students, and the entire environment was a lot more supportive.

I entered the Ph.D. program in Biological & Agricultural Engineering at Cornell University, which was at the time ranked #1 in the nation. I felt proud of that accomplishment—unfortunately and fortunately (both, truly), I was not successful at Cornell. I had a couple of life issues that I needed to work out, including, but not limited to, coming out. Long story short, I left Cornell after 20 months with no degree, no research publications, and with a shaky academic record. I re-started my Ph.D. in Agricultural Engineering at Ohio State 16 months after that, when I felt emotionally ready to “go for it” again. This time, I was successful.

If I look at my entire educational experience, the successes were fine, but the setbacks and failures were the things that really mattered—they played a major role in defining who I am as a professional and as a teacher. I think that as a society, we tend to show off our successes and we don’t talk about our failures. I teach students who are generally terrified to fail. They tend to look at their professors and think that we are 100% successful all the time, and that we have never failed. I freely share my failures with my students—it’s how you deal with failure that’s important. It’s not that failing doesn’t suck or that it isn’t painful—but failure just IS—it’s impossible to live your life without failure as part of it at some point. My failures have made me a lot more understanding and empathic to my students—and at this point, I consider my failures to be largely a gift, even though they felt terrible at the time.

Employment

My employment history looks boring—I’ve had multiple opportunities to leave LSU, but I never have, because the institution has been very supportive and has allowed me a lot of latitude in evolving my research, teaching, and practice activities over the years. I didn’t include graduate appointments or brief periods in which I was working as an engineer, always in a university setting.

• July 2007 – present. Louisiana State University Professor, Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering.
• July 2010 – December 2018. Director, LSU Center for Community Engagement, Learning, and Leadership (50% administrative appointment).
• July 2002 – June 2007. Louisiana State University Associate Professor, Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering.
• October 1996 – June 2002. Louisiana State University Assistant Professor, Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering.

Research and Scholarship

My professorial career started with two research threads, food and bioprocess engineering (mostly ohmic heating of foods) and engineering education (mostly service-learning and community engagement in engineering). I kept active with both these threads from the start of my academic career in 1996, until 2010, when I became the Director of LSU’s Center for Community Engagement, Learning and Leadership. I was then in a 50% faculty, 50% administrative split, and I thought that the only way I could succeed with such a split was to focus all my work on one area, so I focused my scholarship on community engagement.

I recently stepped down as Director (December, 2018) and am back in a 100% faculty position because I wanted to focus more time on scholarship regarding humanitarian engineering (which I view as a community engagement endeavor specific to my profession). I am just now gearing up for this next push and am very much enjoying this process.

In terms of publication, I have a somewhat atypical record because I like forms of publication in addition to journal articles. I especially like books, which really allow a lot of creativity and freedom, and are a great medium when your subject is complex. I have discovered later in my career (2012 onward) that I really enjoy “writing crossover” to the general public.

The main scholarly threads throughout my career involve enhancing access and examining interesting things that happen “at intersections,” for example: intersection of biology and engineering; of community and university; of technology-centered cohorts and non-technology-centered cohorts; of rural and urban, etc. I believe that engineers’ ability to be successful depends in part on our ability to navigate such intersections with humility, empathy, and understanding—it’s how we can design with “the soul of the community” in mind.

Philosophy of Engineering Education

Just like I think that the United States is in a battle over its soul between the competing narratives of equality, fairness and justice on the one hand, and inequity, unfairness, and injustice on the other, I feel like the profession of engineering is in a similar battle. Our profession was founded on better ways to kill each other; engineering has a long history of exclusion, and tends to have an arrogant, cavalier, “better than everyone” mentality and approach that is often oversimplified and fraught with unexamined assumptions; our worship of “objectivity” means, at worst, that we encourage engineers to work inside a vacuum devoid of context and complexity (being objective in and of itself IS taking a position that engineers largely do not acknowledge or are not aware of). I think it’s imperative that as engineering educators, we acknowledge, reflect on, and discuss our profession in an effort to improve it and to determine how we might move forward more effectively. *-/Toward this end, I think we should, as engineering educators:

• Leave behind outdated, ineffective, discriminatory practices in engineering, including one size fits all, non-student-centered learning approaches and weed out courses.
• Prepare our students to be facilitators of change rather than problem-solvers. Sometimes there are indeed problems that need to be solved—climate change, for example, is an existential, massive problem (Consider the question posed by Alice Pawley during the ERM Distinguished Lecture she gave a few weeks ago at the ASEE annual conference: “What will you do, as an engineering educator, to prepare your students to design in a world with 50% fewer carbon emissions in 11 years?”). But I think we tend to make problems out of many situations that are not problems—this approach elevates our importance and egos and makes us the “heroes” that have come to “save the community.” I believe that re-framing our design approach toward an inclusive, collaborative, facilitative process is critical for the future of our profession.
• Move toward social justice and community-based approaches that build human capacity, in such a way as to make engineering a positive force in the world.

ASEE Activities

During the last year of my Ph.D. program in 1996, I was a Teaching Assistant in the first ever offering of a Teaching Engineering course at Ohio State, instructed by Bob Gustafson, the chair of the Department of Agricultural Engineering. Bob made all of us join ASEE as a course requirement—this course is how I found out about ASEE and I have been a member ever since. During our weekly 3-hour meetings, I met Ann Christy, who had just been hired as an assistant professor in the department and was sitting in on the course; Ann became my career-long collaborator in engineering education endeavors as a result of the discussions we had in Teaching Engineering. Ann became an ASEE Fellow in 2019. She is now the instructor of the Teaching Engineering course at Ohio State.

I have been involved with ASEE through my division (the Biological & Agricultural Engineering Division) and have completed “the circuit” of officer positions (secretary, program chair, chair, past chair and awards chair) in this division.

Other Professional Activities

Other professional societies I have been involved with significantly include ASABE, the American Society for Agricultural and Biological Engineers, in which capacity I have served as an Associate Editor for society journals and a webinar instructor for the Review Series for the Profession Engineers Exam in Agricultural Engineering. I am a member of the College of Fellows of AIMBE, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.

In terms of professional activities in community engagement, I was on the editorial board of the Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship (JCES) from the Journal’s inception (2008) until I was asked to become the associate editor (2016). After two years in this position, I became the editor of JCES. This journal is committed to “raising all voices” in community engagement, including those of community partners and students. I am committed to demystifying and facilitating the publication process for early career and non-traditional scholars.

I have also been involved in community-based activities, most notably Volunteers in Public Schools, an organization committed to closing the achievement gap with PK – grade 3 students performing below grade level through 1:1 tutoring and support provided by trained volunteers.