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1. 'I wish I could do more': A qualitative meta-analysis of early career engineers' perceptions of agency in their workplaces

   Lutz, Benjamin; Canney, Nathan; Brunhaver, Samantha (June 2019, Proceedings of the American Society of Engineering Education Annual Conference)

   Engineering students graduate from their programs with a broad range of skills that are set by professional societies, industry recommendations, and other stakeholders in student success. But when those engineers enter their jobs, how are those skills utilized and nurtured by the organizations they enter? The purpose of this paper is to present a cross-sectional, secondary qualitative analysis of research exploring the experiences of recent engineering graduates as they move from student to professional. Of particular interest were the ways engineers describe their autonomy or sense of choice, the way engineers recognize and make sense of their organizations’ values, and the alignment (or lack thereof) between personal values and those of their organization. To do so, qualitative data sets from three different studies of engineers’ experiences at various stages in their professional trajectories were combined and thematically analyzed, producing four major themes that speak to the ways engineers perceive their sense of agency in their work experiences. Looking across data sets, themes emerged regarding empowerment, organizational fit, and workplace expectations. While these themes were common across the studies included in the analysis, the way the themes manifested across data sets raises interesting questions about the formation of engineers and the socialization experiences that contribute to that formation. As research on engineering practice continues to develop, it is important that researchers consider where engineers are within their career trajectory and how that influences their perceptions about the work they do and the agency they have within organizations. 

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2. Early-career Engineers at the Workplace: Meaningful Highs, Lows, and Innovative Work Efforts.

   Klenk, M.; Bjorklund, T.; Gilmartin, S.; Sheppard, S. (January 2018, Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference, June 24-27, 2018. Salt Lake City, Utah.)

   Beyond engineering skills, today’s graduates are expected to have a number of professional skills by the time they enter the working world. Increasingly, innovation is one of the arenas where professional engineers should be adept at operating. However, in order to educate our students for contributing to innovation activities in their organizations, we need a better understanding of the knowledge, skills and attitudes that are relevant for early-career engineers in their development efforts. As a starting point to add to this understanding, we start by asking: what does meaningful engineering work look like in the eyes of early career engineers? We then go on to consider engineering work that is not only meaningful but also innovative, asking: What does innovative work look like in the eyes of early career engineers? Finally, we consider: How do innovative work and engineering work more generally compare? Based on qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews, this paper analyzes the work experiences of 13 young engineers in their first years of work after graduating from universities in the United States. Interviewee-reported critical incidents of top and bottom moments, as well as experiences in creating, advancing and implementing new ideas in work, were coded into different dimensions of learning experiences according to Mezirow’s [1] transformative learning theory in order to understand better what these experiences comprise. Many positively experienced innovation efforts were related to implementing new features or components to products or process improvements, and collaboration and feedback played an important role in these efforts. Negatively experienced innovation efforts, in contrast, were related to a lack in implementation, solutions and resources. Top and bottom moments were strongly tied to the social dimension of work: top moments were typically related to camaraderie with peers or recognition coming from managers, and bottom experiences with an absence of social connections in addition to falling short of one’s own expectations. The results suggest that managers should be cognizant of the importance of social connections and feedback cycles with their young engineers who are looking for guidance and validation of their efforts. For educators, the results highlight the importance of equipping our graduates with skills suited to navigate this active, social landscape of engineering practice. There are more challenges to tackle in today’s educational settings to prepare students for the collaboration, people-coordination, presentation, and community-building skills they will need in their professional lives. 

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3. Mental health in undergraduate engineering students: Identifying facilitators and barriers to seeking help

   https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20551  

   Wright, Courtney J.; Wilson, Sarah A.; Hammer, Joseph H.; Hargis, Lucy E.; Miller, Melanie E.; Usher, Ellen L. (July 2023, Journal of Engineering Education)

   Abstract BackgroundEngineering students encounter high levels of stress, which may negatively impact their mental health. Nevertheless, engineering students who experience mental health distress are less likely than their peers to seek professional help, even when controlling for gender and race/ethnicity. PurposeWe examined beliefs that undergraduate engineering students have about barriers and facilitators to seeking professional help for their mental health. We also sought to identify cultural and systemic factors within and beyond engineering that might affect help‐seeking. Together, these beliefs influence students' sense of personal agency around seeking mental health care. MethodWe implemented a pragmatic qualitative design that incorporated the integrated behavioral model to investigate engineering students' (N = 33) professional mental health help‐seeking beliefs. We used thematic analysis to analyze help‐seeking beliefs and perceived barriers and facilitators that students described during interviews. ResultsWe identified four themes: Navigating the system impacts personal agency; sacrifices associated with help‐seeking act as a barrier; engineering culture acts as a barrier to help‐seeking; and student confidence in help‐seeking varies significantly. These themes portray the effect of perceived barriers and facilitators on students' personal agency for accessing mental health care. Our findings have implications for engineering departments and university counseling centers that want to minimize barriers to help‐seeking. ConclusionsEngineering stakeholders must improve access to professional help for engineering students. Implementing changes to normalize help‐seeking behaviors, enhance personal agency, and facilitate engagement with mental health resources will create better conditions for engineers. Further research is necessary to understand how other beliefs (e.g., attitudes, perceived norms) inform the relationships between student mental health, professional help seeking, and engineering culture. 

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4. User vs. Engineer: Student Perceptions of Responsibility in Social Media

   Stepback, L.; Hwang, M. H.; Claussen, S.; Leonardo, Y. (June 2023, ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   Engineers are responsible to many stakeholders, including the public and their employer. One such responsibility is considering and accounting for the potential impacts and risks associated with a technology that they create. A relatively new, and potentially risky, technology that has been on the rise over the past two decades is social media. The advent of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, and its integration into our daily lives raises questions about the duty engineers bear for its responsible usage and design versus the responsibilities users have as they use the technology. This paper analyzes qualitative interview data from a study on engineering students’ perceptions of engineering ethics and social responsibility to answer the following research question: In what ways do students change (or not change) how they talk about engineers’ social and professional responsibilities to the technologies they create when framed in the context of social media? Our findings show that mentioning social media as a specific application of engineering ethics rendered visible the relationship between engineers, users, and technology that students then utilized to address the broader question about engineers’ responsibility to the technologies they create. In this study, a total of 33 students from three U.S. universities were interviewed longitudinally, once in the first year of their degree and again in the fourth year. In the interviews, the students were asked about their views on the social and professional duties engineers have for the technologies they create, framed in the context of social media. Analysis of student responses involved open and axial coding of relevant interview portions performed by two researchers to identify common themes and longitudinal changes between student interviews. These themes included: communication between the engineer and user, collective responsibility, benefits to society, high quality engineering, and misinformation. While students typically maintained elements of their views across both interviews, it was also common to see students change their responses to include new themes or exclude themes present in their initial interview. The students tended to believe that engineers have a responsibility to think through potential uses (or misuses) of their technology, but also believe that the users share some responsibility to use the technology appropriately. When social media was mentioned specifically, some students believed that the users were entirely responsible for how the technology is used, occasionally contradicting their views of engineering ethics when probed without the context of social media. This paper highlights the central tension between user responsibility and engineer responsibility. By illuminating students’ views, it will support educators in opening a dialogue with their students about who is ultimately responsible for the design and use of new technologies. 

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5. How Do Student Perceptions of Engineers and Engineering as a Career Relate to Their Self-Efficacy, Career Expectations, and Grittiness?

   Morris, Melissa Lynn; Dygert, Joseph; Hensel, Robin A. (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access)

   This complete research paper examines the connection between student beliefs about engineering as a profession, as well as the perceptions of their family and friends, to their reported self-efficacy, career expectations, and grittiness. The student responses examined were obtained from non-calculus ready engineering students at a large land grant institution in the Mid-Atlantic region. The students participated in a well-established program focused on cohort formation, mentorship, professional skill development, and fostering a sense of inclusion and belonging in engineering. The program, consisting of a one-week pre-fall bridge experience and two common courses, was founded in 2012 and has been operating with National Science Foundation (NSF) S-STEM funding since 2016. Students who received S-STEM funded scholarships are required to participate in focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and complete LAESE, MSLQ, and GRIT questionnaires each semester. The researchers applied qualitative coding methods to evaluate student responses from focus groups and one-one-one interviews which were conducted from 2017 to 2019. Questions examined in this paper include: 1) How would you describe an engineer? 2) Please describe what you think an engineer does on a daily basis. 3) What do you think your friends/family think of engineering? 4) What skills or characteristics do you think good engineers have? 5) What types of careers do you believe are filled by degree holding engineers? Student responses on the aforementioned questions were related to the self-efficacy, career expectation, and grit values obtained from the LAESE, MSLQ, and GRIT instruments. The nature of this longitudinal study allows the evolution of student responses to also be examined as they matriculate through their education. Additional analysis was performed to identify themes and numerical trends associated with student populations such as, underrepresented minorities, females, and first-generation college students. Results of this research are presented in an effort to further highlight the importance of exposure to STEM fields during an individual’s K-12 education, and express how student perceptions, self-efficacy, GRIT, and career expectations evolve over their undergraduate education. 

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