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Program leaders put a tremendous amount of thought into how they recruit students for engineering summer camps. Recruitment methods can include information sessions, established partnerships with school districts, and teacher or school counselor nominations of students. This study seeks to assess if the methods used to recruit students broaden participation or have any impact on students’ perceptions of engineering. Two identical week-long summer camps were hosted by the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) in the summer of 2022. Camps were entirely free for all campers. A specific goal of the camp was to promote engineering as a career pathway for students from groups that have been historically excluded from STEM majors. Campers were rising 8th and 9th grade students in two cities near UT Austin; this age was intentionally identified as students who have sufficient STEM backgrounds to engage in meaningful engineering design challenges, and who are also at a critical inflection point with respect to decisions that put them on a trajectory to study engineering in college. Summer camp topics ranged from additive manufacturing to the chemical properties of water proofing, and students did activities such as constructing a prosthetic limb from recovered materials or designing an electronic dance game pad. In one camp session, students primarily found out about the camp by being nominated by counselors at their schools, with an intentional focus on recruiting students who might not otherwise be exposed to engineering. In the other camp session, parents signed up campers after hearing about the camp via information sent through the schools. All students who applied were accepted to the camps. Identical pre- and post-camp surveys asked campers questions about their knowledge of what engineers do, their interest in math and science, and what factors are important to them when choosing a career. Survey analysis showed that there were statistically significant differences in answers to questions between the groups in the pre-camp surveys, but post-camp surveys show that these differences disappeared after participating in the summer camp. Students whose parents directly enrolled them in the camp had higher pre-camp interest in science and technology; thus, counselor nominations may be a method to recruit students who might not have been interested in engineering had they not attended the camp. Additionally, prior to participating, campers recruited via counselor nominations had a narrower view of what engineers do than the parent-enrolled campers, but after camp the two groups had similar perceptions of what engineers do. The results of this study confirm literature findings regarding the importance of exposing young learners to engineering as a profession and broaden their views of opportunities in this field. The recruitment methods used for these camps show that nomination-based recruitment methods have the potential for greater impact on changing students’ engineering trajectories. 

Micro-Raman spectroscopy has become an important tool in probing thermophysical properties in functional materials. Localized heating by the focused Raman excitation laser beam can produce both stress and local nonequilibrium phonons in the material. Here, we investigate the effects of hot optical phonons in the Raman spectra of molybdenum disulfide and distinguish them from those caused by thermally induced compressive stress, which causes a Raman frequency blue shift. We use a thermomechanical analysis to correct for this stress effect in the equivalent lattice temperature extracted from the measured Raman peak shift. When the heating Gaussian laser beam is reduced to 0.71  μm, the corrected peak shift temperature rise is 17% and 8%, respectively, higher than those determined from the measured peak shift and linewidth without the stress correction, and 32% smaller than the optical phonon temperature rise obtained from the anti-Stokes to Stokes intensity ratio. This nonequilibrium between the hot optical phonons and the lattice vanishes as the beam width increases to 1.53 μm. Much less pronounced than those reported in prior micro-Raman measurements of suspended graphene, this observed hot phonon behavior agrees with a first-principles based multitemperature model of overpopulated zone-center optical phonons compared to other optical phonons in the Brillouin zone and acoustic phonons of this prototypical transition metal dichalcogenide. The findings provide detailed insight into the energy relaxation processes in this emerging electronic and optoelectronic material and clarify an important question in micro-Raman measurements of thermal transport in this and other two-dimensional materials. 

Abstract BackgroundEngineering curricula are built around faculty and accreditors' perceptions of what knowledge, skills, and abilities graduates will need in engineering careers. However, the people making these decisions may not be fully aware of what industry employers require for engineering graduates. Purpose/HypothesisThe purpose of this study is to determine how industry employer‐sought professional and technical skills vary among engineering disciplines and levels of education. Design/MethodUsing a large sample (n = 26,103) of mined job advertisements, we use the O*NET skills database to determine the frequencies of different professional and technical skills for biomedical, civil, chemical, electrical, environmental, and mechanical engineers with bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees. ResultsThe most frequently sought professional skill is problem‐solving; the most frequently sought technical skills across disciplines are Microsoft Office software and computer‐aided design software. Although not the most frequently requested skills, job advertisements including the Python and MATLAB programming languages paid significantly higher salaries than those without. ConclusionsThe findings of this study have important implications for engineering program leaders and curriculum designers choosing which skills to teach students so that they are best prepared to get and excel in engineering jobs. The results also show which skills students can prioritize investing their time in so that they receive the largest financial return on their investment.