FIC Mission
The Faculty Innovation Center (FIC) is dedicated to enabling exceptional engineering education at The University of Texas. The FIC provides media, instructional, and faculty development services to support faculty in enhancing their teaching, both with and without technology.
Visit the FIC
Faculty Innovation Center
University of Texas at Austin
Cockrell School of Engineering
ETC 2.146, ETC 4.106 & ETC 5.154
Austin, TX 78712-0292
Phone: 512.471.3850
Fax: 512.232.1786
fic3@mail.utexas.edu
| Buddie Mullins |
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 Dr. Buddie Mullins is someone who likes to teach and finds that the Chemical Engineering Department has very good students. “We compete for the best students in the country,” Buddie explained and “we have a tradition of high expectations.” We should note Buddie’s pride in UT Austin runs deep as he earned both an undergraduate degree in physics and a master’s degree in nuclear engineering at UT. In 1991, Buddie joined the ChE faculty after working at a national lab and completing his doctorate at Caltech.As a student and a professor in our classrooms, he has a unique perspective. He took a class from Dr. Phil Schmidt back in the 70’s. Phil’s teaching and instructional perspectives left a powerful impression on Buddie. Careful instructions were provided on how to respond to assignments and how to answer exam questions. For example, students were required to provide written explanations with numerical answers because in doing so, you could clarify your thinking. To this day, he expects his students to do the same. He remembers one exam that Phil administered in which students were asked to use “effect” and “affect” properly in several sentences. When asked if he could still do that, Buddie laughed and said, “I can, but I don’t want it graded by Phil.” Buddie has had two of the current crop of ChE professors as students; Dr. Tom Truskett as an undergraduate and Dr. Jennifer Maynard as one of his graduate students.  For the last ten years or so, Buddie no longer collects homework in his classes. Instead, during a weekly recitation, students are given a quiz (verbatim on the homework). While students may not always enjoy this “feet to the fire” approach they do learn a lot. Buddie can plot the results of their quizzes versus their end-of-course grades and there is a strong correlation. Learning involves effort and Buddie urges the students to not avoid the struggle. Regarding this point he refers to a quote from to Proust, “We don’t receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us, for it is a point of view about things.” What brought Buddie into the FIC was “the realization that there are resources right here in the School.” He noted how you can get busy and not take the time to utilize services like the FIC. He has found, however, that coming to the FIC has allowed him to come up with a clever and engaging way to present scientific topics to high school students and new undergraduates. Buddie is working with Erik Zumalt, an animator, and Juan Diaz, a video producer, to bring his ideas to life and to add value to his NSF proposal. While this project is still under development, take a look at Max, a dog who has learned how to heat his dog house with a source of renewable energy. We hope that you, like Buddie, will visit us and take advantage of the FIC and its resources. |
| Last Updated on Tuesday, May 05, 2009 |
