In our latest episode of Lexicon, we sat down with Dr. Karen Panetta, IEEE Fellow, Dean of Graduate Education at Tufts University’s School of Engineering, and co-inventor of the first digital twin. Over the course of the conversation, one theme became clear: engineering education is overdue for a serious rethink.

From AI ethics to graduate training, from soft skills to real-world experience, Panetta argues that we are preparing students for a world that no longer exists.

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More than nuts and bolts

Engineering education, Panetta says, has traditionally focused on tools like equations, programming languages, and lab techniques. But that approach no longer inspires students.

“Nobody’s interested in looking at the nitty-gritty tools,” she told us. “That’s almost like saying, ‘Let’s learn about a hammer, and then we’ll just hammer the horse all day.’ Nobody’s interested in that,” she added.

“Now it’s all about connecting the STEM fields to impact,” she explained. “It could be a humanitarian impact. It could be changing lives, keeping people safer, and healthier. It’s not just about the math and science anymore,” she added.

For Panetta, the shift is about context. Students need to understand not just how a tool works, but why it matters.

“The way we teach engineering now has to talk about: where am I going to use this tool? And how am I going to use it to make an impact?” she told us.

That shift, she argues, has led to another critical change: engineering education must be user-centered.

“We think we know everybody’s problems and the solutions to everybody’s problems,” she said. “But every time I’ve gone into a community that’s not what I’m used to, I’ve learned that if I designed it the way I thought I would, they’d never use it. That’d be a waste of everybody’s time,” she added.

“Education today is user-centered. It’s user-inspired now.”

Ethics mustn’t be a checkbox

“You can’t just have one course on ethics and say, ‘Yeah, it applies to every other course,’” Panetta said. “We have short-term memories.”

Instead, she argues, ethics must also run throughout the curriculum.

“It has to be done consistently and synergistically throughout the entire curriculum. And we are not doing enough of that today,” she added.

The urgency becomes even more obvious in the age of artificial intelligence.“AI is going to become like word processors,” she said. “No matter what your discipline, you have to know how to use it.”

But adoption without guardrails is dangerous.

“Think about when the internet first came about — the laws lagged, cybersecurity lagged, everything lagged. We’re in that same stage with AI,” she added. “How do we put guardrails around it? Can we protect people with it? How do we use it effectively?”

“If it’s deciding on somebody’s career or health, you need to ask questions… At the end of the day, it’s got to be a human doing the evaluation,” she added.

You have a voice

Interestingly, Panetta is not in the “ban AI” camp. “We want them to use AI,” she said of her students. “But we’re terrified they’re going to abuse it.”

The key, she argues, is teaching what she jokingly calls “good AI manners.”

“We don’t want it to become their voice,” she said. “You’re almost normalizing so you don’t stand out anymore. Your original voice is not being heard,” she added.

“I’m getting thousands of pieces of paper… 99% of them are written with AI. I want to find and hear their original voice,” Panetta explained.

At the same time, she acknowledges that learning to use AI effectively builds valuable skills. “How you ask the question to AI matters,” she said. “It emerged in a whole area called prompt engineering,” she added.

Using AI, in other words, can sharpen human communication but only if done consciously.

The industry disconnect

Perhaps the most controversial part of our conversation centered on the disconnect between academia and industry. “Why are universities so disconnected from the real world?” she asked.

“I usually joke and say, ‘I had a real job. I was in the industry. So, I know that different perspective,” she said,

Too often, she argues, faculty members go straight from PhD to professorship. “The majority of faculty… went to school, got their PhD, and went right into teaching. So you don’t have that perspective.”

Her solution? Deep industry integration through co-op programs, longer-term placements, and meaningful partnerships.

“Six to eight weeks over a summer — you don’t get continuity,” she said of traditional internships. “By the time they get you trained, it’s basically, ‘Do we want to hire this person?’”

Engineering education, she argues, should resemble an apprenticeship more than a theory silo.

Education “Needs a kick in the pants”

When we turned to graduate education, Panetta was even more direct. “Graduate education needs a kick in the pants and an overhaul,” she said. “It is so antiquated and backwards.”

The problem, in her view, is inconsistency and over-reliance on outdated structures. “What we’re really teaching people is how to be good test takers,” she added.

High-stakes exams and rigid qualification processes, she argues, do not necessarily produce better engineers.

“I do not take anybody in my lab who has a perfect GPA, A-plus person,” she admitted. “Because if somebody is more interested in just getting the score, when I give them an open-ended problem, they’re not going to risk coloring outside the lines,” Panetta told us.

And risk, she says, is essential.

The missing human component

Beyond structure and content, Panetta believes something more fundamental has been lost. “We forgot about the human component,” she said of academic culture.

“Just because you have a PhD doesn’t mean you’re necessarily a good teacher.” Mentorship, lab leadership, and communication are rarely taught, yet critically important.

“There’s no training on how to properly mentor students, how to run a lab,” she added. At the same time, industry leaders consistently tell her what they want.

“I convened 30 CEOs and asked what’s going to distinguish my students,” she said. “Everybody comes out with the same technical skills. What they don’t have is the soft skills — negotiation, communication, presentation,” she added.

Start earlier

Panetta’s perspective extends beyond universities to childhood education. “We’ve been pre-filtering young children,” she said. “‘If you’re good at math and science, go into engineering.’ You’re already filtering out a huge amount of the population,” she added.

Her approach is broader. “We should be starting from birth,” she said. “Baking together and measuring — this is engineering.”

Creativity, art, drama; none of these, she argues, are separate from engineering. “There’s no room for that in engineering? Well, there most certainly is,” she told us.

And here again, she sees AI as an opportunity. “AI can help us bridge those gaps and adapt to our learning styles… and open up learning to remote populations,” Panetta explained.

Engineering for 2040

If she could design an engineering curriculum from scratch for 2040, what would be mandatory?

“Industrial real-world experience,” she said immediately. “Soft skills. Being able to communicate. Being able to present your ideas.”

“Don’t tell me what’s in the book. Tell me how you would do it,” she added.

In an era of generative AI, climate instability, and rapid technological acceleration, Panetta believes engineers must be adaptable, ethical, creative, and brave enough to take risks. 

The future engineer, in her view, isn’t just someone who can calculate. It’s someone who can connect tools to impact, technology to humanity, and knowledge to responsibility.

And if graduate education really does get that “kick in the pants,” the next generation of engineers may look very different indeed.

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