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This research-to-practice full paper presents a series of brief engineering ethics case studies, all inspired by actual incidents recounted during interviews with early career engineers. Current ABET accreditation requirements include ethics-related outcomes for engineering graduates, and most engineering professional societies and employers maintain their own ethics codes. Yet we have limited knowledge about what kinds of ethical situations and issues are faced by practicing engineers, both in general and during early career phases. More nuanced understandings about the ethical dimensions of engineering work could inform training interventions designed to better prepare engineering graduates for workplace realities. This paper aims to bridge research and practice by presenting a series of brief case studies covering a variety of ethical situations encountered by early career engineers. The case studies are adapted from interviews conducted with a stratified sample of 29 technical professionals, all with at least one degree in engineering and 1-3 years of full-time work experience. The interviews were carried out as part of a larger mixed-methods research study investigating how engineering students and early career professionals perceive and experience ethics, social responsibility, and related concerns. The case studies presented in this paper were intentionally selected and developed to reflect different job roles and industry settings, as well as diverse ethical issues encountered by our participants. We present cases that reflect more commonplace or everyday situations that are “microethical” in nature, i.e., involving localized interactions among individual professionals. We also include some suggested scaffolds and resources for instructors seeking to use such cases in their teaching. We intend that this paper will be relevant and useful for instructors who want to bring early career ethics cases into their courses, as well as for those wishing to write short ethics case studies.
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Innovative Courses that Broaden Awareness of CS Careers and Prepare Students for Technical Interviews
While undergraduate Computer Science (CS) degree programs typically prepare students for well-established roles (e.g. software developer, professor, and designer), several emergent CS career roles have gained prominence during the 21st century. CS majors (and students considering CS as a major) are often unaware of the wide range of careers available to job candidates with a CS background. This experience report describes seven innovative courses that broaden awareness of CS career roles and prepare students for technical interviews. Five courses prepared students for these career roles: Full-Stack Developer, Product Manager, ML or NLU Scientist, Technical Entrepreneur, and User Experience Designer/Developer/Researcher. The other two courses had traditional content but explicitly prepared students for technical interviews. These courses were co-developed by industry professionals and CS professors, and co-taught during a semester-long academic program. This paper highlights the replicable aspects of the program: the courses, teaching practices, and evaluation instruments (a teaching practices inventory and a data structures inventory).
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- PAR ID:
- 10454888
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of computing sciences in colleges
- Volume:
- 38
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 1937-4771
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 54-64
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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