2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The desire to institute diversity trainings for large organizational populations is common, but the opportunities may be limited, particularly in the case of university student, faculty, and staff in a large College of Engineering. In this time in history, when incidents related to bias against diverse populations, whether that diversity is racial, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or ability-based, the desire to inculcate attitudinal and skill-based sensitivity to diversity is particularly important.
NC State University has established diversity training for faculty, staff, and students. The training is online and provided by a well-recognized organization, EverFi. Training for undergraduate students is optional. For faculty and staff, the University has set in place a required DEI Training Component for performance plans, which can include EverFi training, among other activities.
The NC State College of Engineering desired to provide additional attention to the importance of diversity for engineers. Desiring to maximize effectiveness, in-person training was desired, despite the difficulty of enforcing a required in-person training for thousands of students. As a first step, a diversity, equity, and inclusion module was designed for use during new student orientation. This module consisted of a 45 minute session led by engineering DEI professionals. It was implemented through a short discussion followed by facilitated role plays. The module was implemented and tested on a smaller scale for testing before its use with the large incoming student population.
This paper presents assessment results from three implementations of the module, done after six months. The first was as training for engineering students hired as leaders for engineering summer programs. The second was for a group of college advisors working with high school students. The final implementation was as a part of new student orientation for 1800 new first year students.