Since 2003, the Composition Program has worked with Pitt's Swanson School of Engineering (SSOE) First-Year Program to provide first-year engineering students with a unique, interdisciplinary curriculum. The yearlong program complements the courses that first-year engineers take with their advisors (ENGR 0081 and ENGR 0082) and the first-year engineering team (ENGR 0011 Introduction to Engineering Analysis and ENGR 0012 Engineering Analysis).
In the fall term course, ENGCMP 0210: Seminar in Composition Engineering, students explore their plans, goals, and decisions as engineering students and as future engineers. Students consider the role of generative AI in academics; what type of engineering discipline or field they plan on pursuing and why; how they are coming to understand personal, academic, and professional integrity and ethics; and how they might continue to pursue personal and professional integrity as they become practicing engineers.
In the spring course, ENGCMP 0412: Engineering Communication in a Professional Setting, students engage in a multi-step process of working in teams of three to write, revise, and submit a paper to the SSOE First-Year Engineering Conference on Sustainability. Each student team then presents their paper at the conference, which typically draws an audience of at least 1,000, including students' families; engineers and other professionals from across the region; corporate recruiters; Pitt Composition faculty; and SSOE faculty, graduate students, administrators, and alumni.
The program was launched in 2003 by Beth Newborg, its founding director, and Dan Budny from SSOE. Since 2023, it has been led by Renee Prymus from English and Irene Mena from SSOE.
About the Program
The papers below document the program's development and offer a window into its pedagogy for faculty and researchers interested in writing instruction in engineering contexts.
2025 Team Writing Prymus and Mena describe and evaluate ENGCMP 0412, the hybrid spring composition course in which first-year engineering students write a 6,000-word conference paper in teams of three. Drawing on reflections from more than 450 students, the paper examines what worked well and what was challenging, including time management, teamwork dynamics, and writing with a cohesive voice, and offers recommendations for supporting student teams in similar large-scale, collaborative writing courses.
2019 IEEE World Conference Proceedings Beth Newborg describes how the program learned to design writing assignments that work for engineering students. The paper traces the move away from abstraction-laden, text-dense liberal arts assignment language toward task-oriented structures, including bulleted requirements, diagrams, patterns, and concrete descriptions, that better reflect how engineering students think and learn. A key insight was that effective composition instruction requires listening to engineers and engineering educators rather than assuming that familiar humanities methods translate directly.
2011 Combining Freshman Engineering and Composition Classes Budny, Newborg, and Ford describe the origins and early development of the program, explaining how the English Department, the Swanson School of Engineering, and the University Library System came together to embed composition instruction directly into the first-year engineering curriculum. The paper details the full sequence of fall and spring writing assignments, the role of library instruction in developing information literacy, and how the program addressed advising goals alongside writing goals, making the case that educating "whole engineers" requires the whole university.
2008 It Takes The Whole University To Instruct The Whole Engineer Thomes, Newborg, Budny, and colleagues tell the story of how the program came to be, narrating the collaborations among the English Department, the Swanson School of Engineering, and the University Library System that made it possible. The paper argues that educating "whole engineers," who can communicate, work in teams, and understand the social impact of their work, requires drawing on the full range of a university's expertise. It also describes the parallel development of the Information Skills for Engineers program, which extended information literacy instruction into the upper undergraduate years.
For more information about this program, contact Renee Prymus, director.