“BARBED-WIRE BOUNDARIES”: HIDDEN CURRICULUM, FIRST-GENERATION AND LOW-INCOME ENGINEERING STUDENTS, AND INTERNSHIP ACQUISITION

Abstract

Engineering industry internships provide significant benefits for undergraduate engineering students’ careers. First-generation and low-income students (FGLI) are one group of marginalized students who access internships at lower rates compared to their non-FGLI peers; however, the reasons for this gap have not yet been explored in the literature. In this article, we investigate the internship ac-quisition experiences of FGLI engineering undergraduate students at a mid-sized private university in the western United States. We conducted ten semi-structured interviews to capture FGLI engineering students’ experiences encountering and navigating the process of obtaining an internship. Our findings highlight the ways in which much of the knowledges surrounding the internship search and recruitment process are implicit and how this implicit hidden curriculum and technocratic culture create structural barriers to internship access for FGLI engineering students. We present a structural critique of internship recruitment through the framework of hidden curriculum and propose that companies and engineering education institutions work together toward transparent modes of evaluation for internship recruitment.