Chris Schmit

Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Education: Ph.D. and M.S. at Iowa State, B.S. at University of Wisconsin-Platteville

Awards: Hogan Award for Teaching Excellence, Bush Redesign Project Grant, Governor’s Award (for integrating software into coursework)

Chris Schmit is a professor who takes teaching seriously.

He attends conferences on the matter, like the Excellence in Civil Engineering Education Workshop, where he mentored young faculty in Civil Engineering to help improve their teaching, or the Bush Faculty Development Conference, where he served as a panelist. “It’s a way to get better,” he says.

Such commitment consistently earns him very high marks in student evaluations. Yet Schmit cites a different reason for his popularity among engineering students.

“To build rapport with students, you have to like students.”

He certainly works hard for them. Schmit incorporates what he’s learned from teaching-building exercises to create curriculums that help improve oral and written communication skills and include in-class assessment methods by which Schmit can gauge just how much of the classroom material his students are actually learning.

“There’re different dimensions to teaching. One is very knowledge-based, very intelligent—but aloof and unapproachable. The other is the Socratic dimension, which combines knowledge on the subject with rapport and helping students feel good about what they’re learning. It’s about how well you connect.”