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This research paper examines students’ perceptions of faculty and how it influences their identity trajectory. First-year students enter undergraduate engineering education with rich stories of how they came to choose engineering as a career pathway. Over time, the culture of engineering and network of peers, faculty members, and professionals shape students' stories and identity trajectories. How students “cast” faculty members in their story, often as helpful or hurtful actors, have implications for their identity trajectory, success, and, ultimately, retention in engineering. In this paper, we used two composite narratives constructed from longitudinal narrative interviews with 16 students to illustrate how students cast faculty into a role as either a support or an obstacle, based on their classroom experiences and interactions with them. This paper highlights the interactions that led these students to view faculty as helpful or harmful and explores the effects resulting: influence over student identity trajectory by fostering or hindering relationship building and networking, as well as influencing intellectual growth and personal ability beliefs. 

In this full research paper, we bring into focus the interplay of conformity to masculine social norms and demographic characteristics (i.e., gender, race/ethnicity, institutional settings) among undergraduate engineering students in the United States. We approached this study with an exploratory, non-experimental design that involved examining patterns of relationship between the conformity to masculine social norms and demographic characteristics of respondents. Our data were obtained from of survey responses by engineering students (n = 128) in first-year general engineering courses at three universities in the Southeastern United States. We operationalized conformity to masculine social norms using the Conformity to Masculinity Social Norms Inventory (CMNI-22). Our results revealed moderate to low conformity to masculine social norms among engineering students in first-year general engineering courses. Overall, student demographic characteristics appeared to have weak to limited influence on levels of conformity. However, the institutional setting interacted significantly with both gender and race/ethnicity such that male students at the public research university setting and white students in the same setting reported significantly higher levels of conformity to masculine social norms than students in other demographic categories. We discuss these findings as they enrich understanding about how institutional contexts might affect gendered social norms related to engineering professional formation. 

https://peer.asee.org/29062 This theory paper explores how diversity apart from social identities like race and gender is framed in the engineering education literature and how these concepts promote a different but compatible approach to understanding diversity—latent diversity. Latent diversity is a new approach to diversity work that captures underlying affective and cognitive differences that provide potential sources for innovation but are not visible. This approach does not examine other non-visible social identities like sexual orientation, first-generation status, socioeconomic status, etc. Prior literature suggests that diversity in approaches, problem solving, and ways of thinking improve innovation in engineering design more reliably than does diversity along the lines of age, race, gender, etc. However, the process of enculturating students into engineering through engineering curriculum often creates homogeneity in students’ approaches to problems, ways of thinking, and attitudes. In this paper, I explore a limited set of existing research on diversity from these underlying perspectives including identities, alternative ways of thinking and being, motivation, cognitive diversity, and innovation and creativity. This work synthesizes the findings of these studies to paint a rich picture of how students develop different attitudes and skills to navigate their paths within engineering. Additionally, this work provides an evidence-based argument for the importance of recognizing and understanding latent diversity to promote a more inclusive environment in engineering and recruit, educate, retain, and graduate more innovative and diverse engineers. This paper opens the conversation about a new, but complementary, focus for developing a STEM workforce rich in talent and capable of adapting to the changing STEM landscape.