Dedicated students, distinguished colleagues and dear friends,

Happy Friday!

How do you prepare the workforce of the future where the gap between their college education and industry needs is minimized? Furthermore, how do you promote possibility thinking to encourage graduates to become not only subject-matter-knowledgeable but also innovative, team-minded professionals? The answer? Create realistic, industry-guided, multidisciplinary projects as part of required experiential learning and reward innovative solutions.

Consider the team of our students that was asked to evaluate and optimize natural gas fuel supply models for a fictional town. They were to create a business plan to address debt incurred during a rare winter storm and a customer-centered marketing plan for a fictional company. They competed against teams from across the country and won the award for the most innovative solution at the 2026 Tenaska Business Challenge. Their solution? A comprehensive usage-scaled business plan that included climate-informed future casts. Interestingly, the team members are not business majors; they are environmental science students. You see, our environmental science program is multidisciplinary by design. Among other requirements, the curriculum includes six credit hours of philosophy, nine hours of economics, six hours of history and political science, and 15 hours of geosciences. The combination of physical, social and environmental education with hands-on experiences provides our students with a unique perspective on real-world challenges.

Or consider our multidisciplinary Mars Rover Design Team that earned first place at the 2025 University Rover Challenge, the world’s premier competition for Mars exploration robotics. Not a small feat considering the competition: 37 finalists from around the world. The secret? A diverse, multidisciplinary team well-versed in the theory and practice of engineering and technology, plus endless effort and experimentation in a real environment. Interestingly, our Mars Rover Design Team will unveil its latest rover and the rover’s name for this year’s University Rover Challenge during the S&T team’s annual Rover Reveal at 2 p.m. CST tomorrow (Saturday, March 7). The event will feature interactive displays, and attendees can speak with team members about last year’s win and this year’s plans.

In short, our required, project-based experiential learning experiences are designed and facilitated to encourage possibility thinking and hands-on work to close the gap between classroom learning and industry needs. To achieve this important goal, in addition to our student design teams, our Innovation Lab – a 50,000-square-foot facility with active learning classrooms, labs for group work, digital content creation studios and maker spaces – is dedicated to enhancing our students’ creative processes and possibility thinking.

The Innovation Lab draws on every educational discipline. Students must transcend their own disciplinary boundaries, work in teams, and draw from engineering, science, art, technology, business acumen, and, most importantly, imagination, to invent, design, develop and deploy disruptive concepts. The idea is to encourage the collision of ideas and to increase cross-disciplinary engagement of our students and faculty.

At every stage of the S&T experience, students learn to work in teams and develop the professional skills needed for success. They learn to build relationships, gather insights and apply what they learn in meaningful ways. Along the way, they try, fail and recover. They develop creative solutions to address real-world situations, become safety-conscious, learn to lead and be led, create, innovate, and gain the skills needed to bridge the gap between rigorous yet important theoretical learning and their future industry careers.

It is no wonder that countless employers who recruit our students – and offer the highest starting salaries across the state – describe them as “career-ready graduates.”

Warmly,

-Mo.
 
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Check out these links:

• David Braswell joins Kummer Missouri S&T Foundation Board
• FIRST Tech Challenge returns to S&T
• Missouri S&T ready to ‘Shamrock ’n Roll’ for St. Pat’s

Mohammad Dehghani, PhD
Chancellor
mo@mst.edu | 573-341-4116

206 Parker Hall, 300 West 13th Street, Rolla, MO 65409-0910
chancellor.mst.edu