Engineers usually pick a lane early: academia or industry. Adele Doser, Ph.D., never quite did. A campus partnership manager at Sandia National Laboratories and a member of ABET’s Industry Advisory Council (IAC), Dr. Doser has spent two decades moving between university classrooms and laboratory research, a path that now shapes how she thinks about what engineering students need to succeed after graduation. She believes more companies should have a direct hand in shaping that education.
“Having a background that’s somewhat in academia and somewhat in industry and government work really provides me with a unique perspective, because I know what employers are looking for,” Dr. Doser said.
An Unplanned Path Between Two Worlds
Dr. Doser initially envisioned a career as a professor and took a postdoctoral position at Los Alamos National Laboratory to prepare for it. A faculty position at the University of Texas at Dallas followed. When she later moved to New Mexico, she joined Sandia but kept teaching as an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico for several years, leading undergraduate courses in signals and systems before stepping back to focus on a growing family and career at Sandia.
She never fully left the academic world behind. Dr. Doser stayed active in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), co-chairing a technical workshop and eventually becoming a senior member. That involvement led her to a presentation at Sandia by ABET’s leadership recruiting new volunteers to become program evaluators, engineers and scientists who assess whether university programs meet ABET’s criteria. Dr. Doser applied and months later received word to report for training in Baltimore.
“I think that having a background in both academia and industry really helps me when it comes to working with professors and department chairs,” she said. “I can offer a different point of view than a lot of program evaluators who have only had academic experience.”
Why Industry Involvement Is Worth the Time
Dr. Doser is direct about why she believes other companies should get involved with ABET, whether through program evaluation, industrial advisory boards or capstone project sponsorship. If a company hires engineers, she said, it has a stake in shaping what those engineers learn before they ever apply for a job.
“If you’re a corporate entity that hires engineers, it’s in your best interest to think about whether you’re getting what you need from your graduate student hires,” Dr. Doser said. “You can become a member of an industry advisory council, work with a university on a capstone project or serve as a mentor. There are lots of different ways for a company to influence the next generation of engineers and make sure they have the required background.”
She points to mentoring as a particularly underrated form of influence. A resume workshop can only do so much, she said; a one-on-one conversation with someone who already works in the field can surface details a student wouldn’t think to include on their own. “Somebody who’s going to read your resume is looking for what makes you unique,” she said. “You need someone across the table who can help you see that.”
Sandia’s own investment in this work is structural, not incidental. The laboratory covers employees’ time for domestic ABET site visits, rather than requiring them to use vacation time, which Dr. Doser says is a major reason Sandia has around a dozen active program evaluators, more than any other non-academic institution she’s aware of. “I think a lot of people I work with really want to give back to their profession,” she said. “They see it as a way to make a difference in the success of a program.”
What ABET Accreditation Actually Solves for Employers
Dr. Doser’s clearest case for accreditation comes from the hiring side of her own experience. When a hiring manager is reviewing a stack of applications, she said, a degree from an ABET-accredited program removes a significant amount of guesswork.
“It’s America’s only nationwide engineering accreditation organization, so if someone is from an ABET-accredited institution, you know what their curriculum looks like. You know they’ve met rigorous qualifications,” Dr. Doser said. “If you’re looking at a school that isn’t accredited, you either have to comb through that student’s transcript or dig through the university’s curriculum online to figure out whether it meets what your company needs.” Without that shortcut, she said, most employers can realistically only vet a small handful of schools closely enough to trust the results, which narrows the pool of graduates they consider. Accreditation removes that ceiling.
Bringing a Rare Perspective to the Industry Advisory Council
Dr. Doser joined the IAC last year and says one of the council’s biggest strengths is the range of organizations represented among its members, from national laboratories to manufacturers to federal agencies. That diversity has been especially valuable given her own background: as a Federally Funded Research and Development Center, Sandia doesn’t compete commercially or bring products to market, so hearing from council members in more traditional industry roles fills in gaps her own career never touched. Last year, for example, a tour of a manufacturing facility with fellow IAC members gave her a firsthand look at a kind of production-line operation she’d never experienced.
“We’re all from very different companies and backgrounds, but I think we work together really well,” Dr. Doser said.
Her own history on both sides of the university-industry divide is what she hopes to bring to that mix: a reminder that the strongest engineering programs are shaped by people who understand both what happens in the classroom and what companies need once graduates walk in the door. It’s also the case she keeps coming back to for why more companies should get involved with ABET in the first place, whether that means volunteering as a program evaluator, joining an advisory council or mentoring a student through a capstone project. Each is a direct way for a company to help shape the graduates it will eventually hire.
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