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Abstract BackgroundGiven high attrition rates and lack of interest in faculty careers, it is crucial to understand how doctoral engineering students conceptualize academia and academic careers. Purpose/HypothesisThis study aims to characterize the development of academic disenchantment among engineering students who have considered departure from their doctoral programs. Schema theory was used to explore how students develop and evolve in their conceptualizations of academia through their lived experiences. Design/MethodData were collected from 42 graduate students from research‐intensive universities across the United States who participated in qualitative, semi‐structured interviews investigating expectations for graduate school, experiences, attrition and persistence considerations, and career trajectories. The transcripts were thematically analyzed through open and axial coding to understand how students constructed their schemas of the academy. FindingsExperiences and quotations of four participants are presented to describe the results of the transcripts. Participants' misaligned expectations of their graduate program's values and practices, coupled with a lack of agency and support, led them to see their graduate programs as antagonistic to their short‐ and long‐term career success. Even for students who may likely persist through to PhD degree completion, the development of disenchantment dissuades students—even those who once desired a faculty career—from interest in the academy. ConclusionsBy understanding how disenchantment arose in our participants' experiences, we better understand how to equip students with resources that will help them navigate graduate programs. This research advances the literature by identifying underutilized opportunities to prepare students to cope with the challenges of engineering doctoral education.
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Expectations in engineering programs: Between social construction and internalized experience (2020, June), Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content https://peer.asee.org/34627
Prior research established that expectations play a significant role in students educational experiences. Academic and non-academic expectations can contribute to students’ stress and anxiety, and have been shown to impact achievement and retention. This study uses ethnographic methods to investigate how expectations are socially constructed in engineering programs and how students’ come to internalize these expectations. Data was collected in ten focus groups with a total of 38 participants at two universities with different institutional characteristics. The qualitative analysis drew on constant comparative methods and proceeded from topic coding of sources of expectations to interpretive coding of mechanisms in which students internalized experiences. More specifically, sources of expectations were identified as academics, superiors, peers, extra-curricular, and from outside the major. The rich account of students' lived-experiences shows a complex interplay of expectations from multiple sources. The mechanisms of compounding, conflicting, and triangulating expectations show that the interactions of expectations can amplify their emotional impacts on students. The results indicate that students judge their own performance or belonging in engineering relative to the systemic functioning of expectations. For educators, this insight has profound implications on how we communicate performance standards without inadvertently reinforcing social performance expectations that can contribute to problematic cultural features of engineering learning environments.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1752897
- PAR ID:
- 10173404
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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