| | AUGUST - 202319employment opportunity they haven't had the opportunity to demonstrate subject matter expertise or judgment yet, so articulation and demonstration of soft skills may even be more important.To support this need, my office has developed programs to help UCI students working towards jobs in technology bridge the gap between classroom learning, real-world application, and social & emotional learning. Our first-generation students may not have had these skills and insights passed down in the same way as students whose parents did go to college. Given how important we know social & emotional skills to be, both career and life, we need to incorporate learning opportunities and content into what they get exposed to here at UCI. Creating this type of additional support is top of mind for us because we have a very large first-gen population within your student body.3. As SEL helps develop essential soft skills to effectively tackle emotions and develop strong relationships with peers in the school as well as in society, what is your opinion on the long-term impact of SEL on individuals of all ages?As I've progressed through my life, not just in my career, my soft skills are the things that helped me be effective in working with others. This transcends the workplace. It's also living in a community, dealing with your neighbors, and even figuring out how to navigate conflict in your own family. Your ability to handle conflict, figure out how to build upon someone else's ideas, make people feel included in the conversation, and the ability to take an idea and influence it in the direction that you know is better for the overall situation - these are all skills learned through social & emotional learning. Soft skills come into play all the time, especially as you move into roles of leadership where you stop doing so much and become a convener of people around the topic and shape people's ideas into an idea that the group can agree to move forward on. So for me soft skill development is the one that we underappreciate in the traditional learning setting that's focusing more on content for hard skills or technical skills. In my experience, it's the soft skills that I've seen trip people up the most when it comes to advancing themselves in a workplace setting and trying to advance their careers.4. Would you say social and emotional learning will be key in solving the problems of tomorrow? Whether it's sustainability or any of the other big things that UCI is concerned about?Absolutely, and one may even say that it's going to be even more important, because more and more, the breakthroughs that we need for really complex problems require people from different backgrounds (different ethnic backgrounds or community backgrounds) and fields of expertise. The ability to be empathetic and a good listener becomes important when the differences between people are larger. What I find today is whether it's in a research setting or whether it's out in the community trying to solve complex issues, like challenges with mental health or housing insecurity, you have different types of people, different backgrounds coming into the conversation, and this is where social and emotional intelligence is really important if you want to lead effectively in those situations.5. Can you shed light on the experiences that empowered you to gain deep expertise in creating the Collaboratories at UCI, and using technology and data to advance in success through your podcast, Digital Squared?What I have experienced, especially in this world where technology is increasingly driving the speed of change, is that we need to be able to take advantage of these advances in technology and more importantly, the data that these technologies create, to be able to realize the benefits out of them. It's not just about bringing data together; it's about bringing subject matter experts who understand the data and creating an environment for them where they can cross-pollinate with each other. I like to use the phrase that data is the common clay that master artisans come together to create the next masterpiece. You bring your data, I bring my data, and we both understand our data from the expertise that we have. And so the concept of the Collaboratory is, `How do you create an environment where you can bring the data together, but as importantly, the people around the data who can create the next great insight?'IT'S NOT ENOUGH JUST TO HAVE A DIPLOMA, YOU HAVE TO COME TO THE WORKPLACE READY TO USE THE KNOWLEDGE LEARNED IN YOUR CURRICULUM COMBINED WITH AN UNDERSTANDING OF HOW TO USE THE SKILLS AND TECHNOLOGIES THAT ARE PREVALENT IN TODAY'S WORK ENVIRONMENT
< Page 9 | Page 11 >