I used to teach sociology at an Indian engineering university. For my students—specializing in computer science, design, and electrical and communication—sociology often felt like a “filler” subject. They saw it as an easy grade booster that required little effort compared to their intense engineering curriculum.

This mindset was rooted in India’s broader educational hierarchy. Educational streams in India, in particular, are socially ranked, with science and engineering consistently dominating, followed by commerce, while social sciences and humanities consistently rank at the bottom. This systematic devaluation of the social sciences and humanities created a deep cultural bias, often leading to their suppression in academic discourse. Within this context, entering an engineering-dominated setting to teach sociology was a pedagogical challenge. It pushed me to rethink and adapt my teaching approach. I realized that my task was not just to teach sociology, but to explain the relevance of the discipline to students whose primary interests lay elsewhere.

Here’s what I learned about teaching sociology to future engineers.

The Two Ways of Seeing the World

Engineers are trained to solve problems using clear rules, numbers, and predictable, efficient systems. Consequently, introducing concepts like “stateless societies” or “gender as a social construct” often caused immediate confusion. These students frequently viewed sociology as fuzzy, subjective, and even frustrating.

The engineering mind primarily seeks linear causality. The sociological mind primarily embraces complex, invisible, non-linear forces. The hurdle was evident when, in one of the classes, we discussed Emile Durkheim’s classic study on suicide (1951). It linked suicide rates to social relations and regulation. A student remarked, “But society can’t make someone jump off a bridge! It’s their choice!” Their world prioritized individual choices and physical causes, while I was asking them to acknowledge invisible forces like norms and shared beliefs. I needed to build a bridge between these two fundamentally different ways of understanding human life.

The “But How Is This Useful?” Question

Engineering undergraduates are intensely focused on practical application. Their constant refrain was: “Why does this matter? How can I use this?” Sociological theory’s complex relation to real-world utility felt like a waste of time, compelling me to re-evaluate my pedagogy.

I understood that abstract theory must be anchored to their potential professional future. Explaining Karl Marx’s (1992) concept of alienation by referring to Capital or The Communist Manifesto alone was insufficient. Instead, I pivoted to its current manifestation: How does alienation appear in the gig economy and the corporate industry? We analyzed the long work hours of both gig and corporate workers through Marx’s lens of worker rights and labor economy. This generated intense debates and helped them analyze their potential future workspaces, decoding the initial “so what?”

A Classroom Breakthrough

The most rewarding pedagogical breakthroughs occurred during discussions on gender, specifically when we moved from abstract theory to the concrete, everyday reality of household labor. Initially, to students trained to quantify everything, housework and domestic labor appeared as a simple optimization problem, solvable with better technology and time management.

In the classroom, we saw an opportunity to use a technical object—a machine—to unpack their understanding. We focused on a common kitchen gadget, the washing machine, and asked, “At your home, who primarily used the washing machine?” Students shared anecdotes: Mothers primarily used the machines, while fathers only used them when instructed. They also observed that the machine’s arrival often led to higher standards of cleanliness, which paradoxically increased the workload for their mothers. This was the breakthrough moment: Through their own everyday experiences, students learnt that unequal household labor was rooted in gendered socialization, and not so much a matter of technical efficiency. We had a long and intense discussion about how these unwritten gendered rules are learned and enforced within families, and why introducing technology and appliances often fails to reduce the total burden and inequality of domestic work.

Finding a Common Language of Rubric

Another revealing struggle emerged during assessments. Students repeatedly asked: “Can we have a rubric? Exactly how many points is the argument worth? What are the exact answers?” Their aversion to “subjective grading” highlighted their discomfort with a social world that lacks clear schematics. For them, a well-defined rubric was a specification, guaranteeing that input (effort) would yield a predictable output (a grade). They interpreted “subjective assessment” to mean they could write everything they had ever read on a topic, such as writing about bureaucracy when asked about bureaucratic ritualism.

We needed to translate the rigor of sociological thinking into their language of specification and procedure. We defined a rubric according to their engineering vocabulary: “Evidence” meant citations, and “critical analysis” meant connecting observations to theoretical frameworks. We also structured answers into “introduction,” “body,” and “conclusion” components with allotted marks. This approach was aimed at explaining subjective assessment and providing a common language that made answering complex social concepts more structured.

A Reflexive Experience

Overall, this journey was a reflexive experience, pushing me to confront my own academic bias: the assumption that the value of sociological inquiry is self-evident. I realized that the students’ initial dismissal of the social sciences was a direct byproduct of India’s STEM-first educational hierarchy—a context I was compelled to integrate into my pedagogy. Further, their demand for rubrics and practical applications pushed me to deconstruct my specialized vocabulary and sharpen my thinking, translating sociological frameworks into a language that resonated with their engineering minds.

There were also many moments of student engagement where this pedagogical adaptation paid off. I will end this note with one such moment. A student discussed whether a hiring algorithm’s gender bias required a purely technical fix or a deeper social intervention and put forth the argument that a code-based solution might only mask structural inequality. Such moments outline the larger point of teaching sociology to future engineers: to create responsible builders who understand that code and machines are embedded in social values with ripple effects throughout society. They are never neutral. Ultimately, my time with these engineering undergraduates was a process of identifying the critical ground where the drive to solve meets the drive to understand social life.