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Background: How do Indigenous engineering students describe their engineering leadership development? The field of engineering has made only slow and modest progress at increasing the participation of Indigenous people; an identity-conscious focus on leadership in engineering may help connect the practice of engineering with Indigenous students’ motivations and values. Methods: This study utilized a grounded theory qualitative approach to understand how Indigenous engineering students at a U.S.-based university experience engineering leadership. We explored the experiences of four Indigenous engineering students through one interview and one focus group. Results: Students pointed out how Indigenous peoples had long engaged in engineering work before contact with European settlers, and they saw an opportunity for leadership in applying their engineering knowledge in ways that uplifted their home communities. Conclusion: In addition to ways that engineering programs can better support Indigenous students who aspire to become practicing engineers, our study pointed to new directions engineering programs could take to frame engineering work as providing a toolkit to improve one’s community to leverage a wider set of motivations for entering engineering among many different communities underrepresented in engineering, including Indigenous students. 

Engineering knowledge is characterized by an artificial “border” that distinguishes technical expertise from the professional skills needed to solve society’s most pressing problems. Scholars of engineering leadership argue that students who are provided opportunities to blur that distinction and integrate their technical and professional training are better prepared for interdisciplinary and transnational engineering work. This “Lightning Talk” session brings together engineering leadership researchers from universities in Australia, Canada, and the United States to explore an array of approaches to understanding and developing engineering leadership. Best practices are presented followed by a panel discussion of the implications for internationalizing work on engineering leadership. 

Through the efforts of government and industry, there is growing recognition among academics of the importance of developing leadership skills in engineering students. Despite this recognition and the increasing level of resource put into engineering leadership programs throughout North America, there is currently little work that illustrates how leadership fits into the broader picture of the heterogeneous nature of engineering work. This work seeks to begin closing that gap by investigating the relationship between models of engineering identity and leadership identity. The investigation is done using quantitative techniques to draw conclusions from two data sets taken from national surveys of undergraduate students in the U.S.. Initial results indicate that while engineering students are engaged in leadership positions more frequently than their peers inother fields (other STEM and non-STEM) they see less of a connection between these roles and their future careers than other students, indicating a potential conflict between an engineering identity and a leadership identity. 

In an era of scientific and engineering advancement, we need engineers who have a diversified skillset. More specifically, in order to solve many of the complex problems faced today, industry is calling for engineers who combine their technical expertise with leadership qualities. These qualities can be developed in engineering students’ formative years as undergraduates. However, how leadership qualities are developed in engineering students is still not well understood in engineering education community. As part of a larger project, this work reviews the development of a pilot intervention with freshman engineering students aimed at furthering that understanding. This intervention was informed by a combination of quantitative data analysis, qualitative exploration, and engineering leadership identity theory. Quantitative analysis was based on two national data sets; Qualitative exploration was based on 20 engineering focus groups involving 17 majors from three universities. The goal of this research was to identify an intervention that would impact students in ways that cultivated an engineering leadership identity. To develop this intervention, characteristics of impactful experiences in the development of engineering leadership identity were explored using the data described previously. A transcendental phenomenological approach was used to explore both the content of the experiences (textural) and the context of those experiences (structural). By focusing on the most impactful experiences, a three-pronged intervention was identified. The data indicate that the development of an engineering leadership identity is largely influenced by a bifurcation between technical and interpersonal (or professional) aspects of the profession. Moreover, the data indicates that well-executed group projects and corresponding support activities are instrumental in engineering student leadership development.