High-enrollment mechanical engineering programs meeting the challenge of career advising through a seminar course

Abstract

How are engineering students receiving career guidance? Campus career services tend to provide high-level career exploration tools and are generally underutilized by students. Within academic departments, particularly those with a significantly high student population (for the purposes of this study, considered to be over 800), individualized career advisement can be challenging to meet with excellence. Two such programs in mechanical engineering at Pennsylvania State University and Texas A&M University have taken a different approach. Career advisement has been incorporated into a seminar course. A preliminary study was conducted to assess the course effectiveness by surveying students enrolled in the corresponding seminars. This paper describes how both courses are structured and presents a discussion of results from the student survey. Overall, curricular-based career advisement is shown to be an effective way to reach a large number of students, equip them with knowledge to make informed career choices, and guide them in an approach to lifelong learning.