Leslie Potter’s current focus is helping IMSE undergraduate students make two transitions: one from high school to college, and the other from academia to industry. After seven years of working in industry and one year of teaching at UNI, Ms. Potter returned to Iowa State’s IMSE department to teach the Senior Design Capstone course (IE441), which she did for over twelve years. In that role, she recruited Iowa-based companies to work with senior design students, helped identify semester-long projects, and then led the students through the process of problem definition and solution generation for open-ended design problems. She emphasized the importance of technical and professional skill integration, including engineering problem solving combined with communication and professionalism skills. Now as the freshman engineering instructor, she sets the foundation for students as they work toward their internships, capstone design course, and beyond. She brings both pragmatic industry experience and high expectations to IE148, Information Engineering. Her research interests are focused on continuous improvement in the classroom, using multiple stakeholder inputs to drive change.