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There is little empirical research that provides a broad understanding of graduates’ interests in industry and engineering job opportunities. This study aimed to analyze differences in industry participation between engineering majors, undergraduate engineering student participation in job fair events, and student hiring recruitment trends.A quantitative approach was used to address: RQ 1: How are the industry work opportunities different between different engineering majors at a large Midwest institution?; and RQ 2: How do job fair participants and hiring in engineering industry differ for BME students from other engineering majors at a large Midwest institution? The Ohio State University Department of Biomedical Engineering has observed lower hiring trends for undergraduate biomedical engineering students pursuing industry relative to other engineering majors. In this study, the number of companies interested in a major was different between majors. This makes it clear that companies present in each job fair have a higher preference for some major over others. Understanding if that difference is more prevalent of pre-major students or a different effect would require further study. Undergraduate student hiring was observed to be different between majors, but this has been previously reported (Nocera et al. 2018, Ortiz-Rosario et al. 2019). This study also found that recruitment-attendance ratios, a rough metric of yield, were significantly different between engineering majors. With better recruitment data, these ratios could indicate differences in the effectiveness of job fairs for different engineering majors. Future work will continue to search for factors that explain why there is a gap in BME industry hiring, and on ways to bridge that gap. 

Workshops hosted at recent Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) meetings have identified the leap from university to a career in industry to be a nation-wide challenge for Biomedical Engineering (BME) undergraduate programs and their alumni. While some strides are being made to better utilize industry feedback to steer the future of BME curricula, a more holistic understanding of the factors influencing engineering students’ career outcomes is desired. Here, we present an exploratory study analyzing the relationship between the factor of diversity (gender, ethnicity) and undergraduate engineering students’ workforce opportunities (co-op, internship, and full-time employment offers, starting salaries). Using data collected by our university’s Engineering Career Services, we will present gender and ethnicity-based analyses of workforce opportunities and career outcomes for BME students, compared to three other undergraduate engineering majors at our university. As often typical with other BME programs, the BME major at our university has the highest percentage of female and under-represented minority students (31.7% and 15.0%, respectively), compared to our college of engineering as a whole (22.5% and 6.5%, respectively). Identifying potential diversity- and major-based inequities could provide further insight for how to improve retention and maintain appropriate pathways into the engineering workforce.