NSF Award
2404731
As society’s problems continue to become increasingly more complex, engineers need new skills to tackle these problems head-on. One approach to arming engineers with this skillset is through interdisciplinary engineering education. This method is different from traditional single disciplinary engineering education and helps foster broader thinking and creative insights. For the US to maintain its competitive edge in the global workforce, engineers must learn to work effectively in cross-functional teams. To address this need, universities are offering interdisciplinary programs that allow students to expand the boundaries of their education in ways that match their career goals and industry needs for creative problem solvers. Understanding student career choice can help universities better tailor programs to meet student needs. This project contributes to the NSF’s goal of broadening participation by exploring new ways in which multi- and interdisciplinary engineering programs affect students’ career goals and choices during their education. The research team will explore factors that guide students’ academic and career pursuits and determine the student perceived value in engaging with interdisciplinary learning and experiences during their undergraduate education. The results can be used to improve the way we train engineers to solve the complicated and multidimensional issues of the 21st century.<br/><br/>The project will use a qualitative research design to build on the knowledge of how engagement in multi- and interdisciplinary programs impact engineering students’ career choices. The research team will conduct interviews with students in both multi-disciplinary and single disciplinary engineering programs at a large public university. Interviews will be framed using social cognitive career theory and will explore how learning experiences, personal characteristics, and environmental influences impact students’ decision-making process for career selection, as well as outcome expectations and their confidence in their ability to succeed on that path. Researchers will employ inductive and deductive thematic analysis techniques in combination with narrative analysis to elevate the experiences and perspectives of diverse engineering students. The results of this research will generate knowledge about how multi- and interdisciplinary programs influence students’ career choices and decisions to persist in an engineering career. These findings on interdisciplinary engineering education will help educators design programs to support tomorrow’s industry needs and adapt to evolving career paths. As a director of an interdisciplinary engineering program, the PI is well-positioned to make significant positive impact on the nearly two hundred students who are enrolled annually in an integrated business and engineering program at a large public university. The advisory board will support the research team in interpreting findings and tailoring dissemination to other leaders of similar programs in the US. The project also supports NSF’s significant investment in research initiation grants in the last decade by using a collaborative autoethnographic study of this project to explore the mechanisms by which research mentoring relationships succeed. The findings of the collaborative autoethnographic study will expand the knowledge of how structured mentorship of engineering faculty can build research capacity in engineering education. This will have useful implications for NSF research initiation programs such as the Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF) and Building Capacity in STEM Education Research (BCSER) programs and will also offer the potential to improve other peer-to-peer or hierarchical mentor training initiatives.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
