Early exposure to engineering practitioners provides informed choices for students continuing engineering programs

Abstract

The engineering education literature calls for studies highlighting the impact of students' early exposure to post-graduate engineering careers. This paper provides data critical to assessing the effectiveness of a unique first-year experience concept: exposing new students to the careers of practicing engineers. We report on an initiative for incoming students to the mechanical and energy engineering (MEE) major at the University of North Texas (UNT). Our mandatory freshman course sequence, Mechanical and Energy Engineering Practice, includes exposure to practicing engineers as a significant component of the first-year experience by highlighting activities and responsibilities that engineers encounter after college as they join the profession. Classes are team-taught by the MEE faculty in concert with practicing engineers from local industries. Faculty share their careers as research engineers, whereas practicing engineers expose students to industry work. Through data collected from students enrolled in this course sequence, we test the hypothesis that educating new engineering students about the responsibilities, activities, and projects they may encounter as practicing engineers will have a positive impact on their intention to continue in engineering programs beyond the freshman year. We present results from a survey, which students took on the first day of class and then re-took on the last day in both Fall 2007 and Spring 2008. Interestingly, while students' self-reported level of interest in pursuing an engineering career remains positive and unchanged after exposure to engineering practitioners, students' reported desire to remain in the MEE department at the end of these classes declines. This drop is statistically significant. We argue that these low-risk, introductory-level, one-credit-hour courses function to familiarize students with the careers of practicing engineers while providing the exposure students need to decide whether the major and university they have selected is the correct long-term choice for them. At this early stage, they can choose to change programs for a better fit. We call this academic self-selection process "soft weeding," juxtaposed against "hard weeding" by which students are forced out of a program against their will after prolonged poor performance in several high-risk upper-division courses. Simultaneously, the courses positively reinforce and motivate students who find engineering careers a good match, helping them to persevere in their core pre-engineering courses. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2009.