Engineering education, today, has changed with the evolving job requirements that demands for more than only a domain-specific knowledge. Engineers are expected to address more complex challenges of future that require knowledge from different disciplines. Also, in this era of market competition, the enterprises expect them to come up with innovative ideas to have an edge. Thus, conventional engineering education is going through a transition phase with rapidly changing technology and job demands. Acknowledging this evolving need, many technical institutes have taken the initiative to incorporate creative design education in engineering curriculum to give students a liberal, multi-disciplinary, holistic, and creative outlook for addressing complex multi-disciplinary problems. But, imparting design education to undergrads along with their engineering majors has its own practical challenges. Design education has a subjective and intuitive approach, which involves imagination, reflection, and iteration which is sharply in contrast with the objective technical engineering teaching. Hence, holding the attention and interest of students from non-design background is sometimes a tough task for the mentors. The paper aims at highlighting the problems faced by mentors while teaching design to the engineering UG students at Shiv Nadar University. Based on their experiences, the authors have put forward several insights that might help young mentors interacting with the students with non-design background. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2019.