Where does the personal fit within engineering education? An autoethnography of one student's exploration of personal-professional identity alignment

Abstract

This paper presents an exploration of personal-professional identity alignment through the use of an autoethnography. To understand identity and identity formation, my research advisor and I drew from post-modernist perspectives of identity as being highly contextualized, co-created between the individual and their surroundings, and neither singular nor stagnant. I am a senior, male undergraduate engineering student who worked as a research assistant in a separate engineering education study on engineers' imaginaries of "the public." My exposure to documents and interviews associated with this work began to illuminate and sometimes even change my views of personal identity, my understanding of my engineering identity, my perception of core values within the engineering profession, and how those elements interacted. Analysis of three of my journal entries through a lens of identity formation showed evidence of misalignment between my personal and professional identity expectations and experiences. This misalignment brought into question for me my fit within "the system" - the way I was trained, what I was trained for, and the larger views of the engineering profession with respect to how I should contribute to society.