The Grand Challenge for Science and Math

It could have been a Final Four basketball game for Duke. The university's students clamored for tickets, professors canceled classes, and organizers fretted over getting twice as many applicants as spaces. But this was a different kind of March Madness. The furor was over an engineering conference held at Duke on Mar. 2-3. Despite a snowstorm, 700 students from around North Carolina slogged through the snow to attend a conference they hoped would set them on the path to changing the world.

The Grand Challenges Summit was a conference to discuss the most important challenges facing society and how engineering and science can help solve them. Debates have raged for decades about the lack of interest in science and engineering among U.S. students. After witnessing the students' reaction to this summit and their determination to attend in the face of Mother Nature's best efforts to dissuade them, I couldn't help but wonder whether the reason why we struggle to entice undergraduates into engineering is lack of effective motivation, rather than lack of interest. Ask a student to be an engineer and they might blink at you. Ask them to better the world with science and they jump up and down.