As I’d previously served on the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s industry advisory board, I was asked in 2002 to evaluate the department’s design program. After I made my suggestions, the department chair asked the ECE faculty how many of them wanted me to teach the senior capstone design course the next semester.

Every hand went up. 

I reminded them that I already had a job in industry and hadn’t taught since I was a graduate student.

But I showed up that fall and I taught.

And the students hated me.

Dean of Students Kim Knox asked to see me. 

When I got to her office, Kim said, ‘The students hate you.’ I replied, ‘I told you that I couldn't teach.’

‘No, they don't hate you because you can't teach,’ she said. ‘They hate you because you're making them do a lot of work.’ I said that I didn't know how you become an engineer without doing the work.

‘That's correct,’ she said. ‘Now, explain that to them.’

I’d been telling students a lot of stuff, but not why I was sharing what I was sharing. So, to make it relevant, I told stories. I'd describe a problem from industry that my colleagues and I had taken months to solve. At first, when I asked my students to solve it, they looked at me like they had no freaking clue.

But I used stories to show that the best way to do engineering is backwards. 

‘What problem are you trying to solve?’ and ‘What does success look like?’… they are bookends. 

You start at success and ask, ‘What is the step immediately before success?’ You keep working the design process backwards, step by step, until you reach the problem definition you were trying to solve in the first place.

Being a good engineer and designer isn't about what you know; it's about the questions you ask.

—Ronald Lasser (who asks his students to call him Ron) is a professor of the practice at the School of Engineering and a seven-time winner of the school’s Henry and Madeline Fischer Award for teaching excellence.

Our Tufts is a series of personal stories shared by members of the Tufts community and featured on both Tufts Now and Instagram.