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Recent calls throughout the engineering education community have focused on increasing diversity and broadening participation in STEM, particularly within the field of engineering. Many of these conversations have been dominated by research examining race and gender, with little if any work addressing disability. Agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the American Institute for Research have begun to implore educators and researchers to include the experiences of disabled students within these conversations to gain a better understanding, meet the needs, and promote the success of this marginalized population. Such work is crucial to broadening participation in engineering, as students with disabilities can experience daily challenges not experienced by their peers without disabilities. Such challenges include the negotiation of physical, cultural, and bureaucratic structures to access necessary resources for academic and workplace success. In this paper, we introduce a recently-initiated longitudinal, grounded theory exploration of the experiences of civil engineering students with disabilities as they move through their undergraduate careers and into the workforce. To provide context and establish the need for this type of work in engineering education, we discuss prior research that highlights the current state of disability studies, particularly within the engineering education and higher education literature. We then identify the sensitizing concepts underpinning this study and outline our research methods, including data collection and analysis plans. As this project is currently in the initial phase, we conclude with a discussion of challenges encountered and strategies for overcoming those challenges as well as next steps. 

While recent calls throughout the engineering education community have focused on increasing diversity and broadening participation in STEM, these conversations typically center on race and gender with little to no work addressing disability. But research in higher education broadly suggests that cognitive, physical, and learning disabilities can markedly impact the ways in which students perceive and experience school, develop professional identities, and move into the engineering workforce. To address this gap, we build on emerging conversations that explore the ways in which students experience disability within the context of engineering education. In particular, we conducted an initial grounded theory analysis of interviews examining professional identity formation in undergraduate civil engineering students who experience disabilities. From our analysis, we observed three themes that begin to highlight ways in which the experience of students with disabilities may contribute to their development as emerging civil engineers.