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Engineering industry internships provide significant benefits for undergraduate engineering students’ careers. First-generation and low-income students (FGLI) are one group of marginalized students who access internships at lower rates compared to their non-FGLI peers; however, the reasons for this gap have not yet been explored in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the internship acquisition experiences of FGLI engineering undergraduate students at a mid-sized private university in the western United States. We conducted ten semi-structured interviews to capture FGLI engineering students’ experiences encountering and navigating the process of obtaining an internship. Our findings highlight the ways in which much of the knowledges surrounding the internship search and recruitment process are implicit and how this implicit hidden curriculum and technocratic culture create structural barriers to internship access for FGLI engineering students. We present a structural critique of internship recruitment through the framework of hidden curriculum and propose that companies and engineering education institutions work together toward transparent modes of evaluation for internship recruitment. 

DEI programming in recent years has focused significant efforts on fostering inclusion of visible identities, such as race/ethnicity, certain dominant gender identities, and certain dominant forms of sexual orientation. However, there is a lack of understanding of how DEI programs can target people with multiple, possibly invisible, marginalized identities, such as asexuality. Furthermore, while DEI programs tend to provide valuable and necessary support spaces for students from marginalized backgrounds, they may not consider how marginalized students create their own resistance practices. In this paper, we explore the liminal space of invisible identity and its intersections with other identities through a case study of an asexual cis-gender woman undergraduate engineering student through the lens of transformational resistance and identity development. Through her narrative, we see how transformational resistance can occur at any part of the identity development process, though certain identities during these parts may not be salient or significant to the individual. This paper addresses the complexity in creating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) spaces for invisible marginalized identities and offers the experiences of the participant to question the bounds of inclusivity in these spaces.