2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There is an urgent need to recruit, retain, train, and sustain a diverse engineering workforce able
to meet the socio-technical and environmental challenges of 21st century society. Together,
student veterans and service members (SVSM) are a unique yet understudied group that
comprises substantial numbers of those historically underrepresented in engineering based on
their race, ethnicity, gender, or ability. That, in combination with technical
interests and skills, maturity and life experience, and leadership and teamwork training, makes
SVSM ideal candidates for helping engineering education meet these demands.
This NSF CAREER project aims to advance full participation of SVSM within higher engineering
education and the engineering workforce. The project plan comprises a 1) Research Plan to
develop deeper understandings about how SVSM participate, persist, and produce professional
identities in engineering education, and an 2) Education Plan to place new understandings into
practice through collaborative development, implementation, and broad dissemination of an
evidence-based orientation, community building and mentorship workshop for SVSM in
engineering, and a set of modularized awareness/support training materials to introduce
engineering faculty, staff, and administrators, and the general engineering student populace to
military student issues. The research plan builds from previous work using a longitudinal,
narrative inquiry research approach and an innovative, two-strand theoretical framework. In
doing so, it aims to both critically examine higher engineering education structures and
interpretively explore SVSM professional identity development in engineering programs at 2- and
4- year public institutions in the western United States. The education plan draws from both
grounded theory methods and design based research approaches. Concurrent with the research
plan, the education plan works to connect local theory to practice by characterizing the current
support structures available for SVSM in engineering and higher education, and implementing
new supports based on SVSM identities and both required and preferred resources.
This paper reports on project activities conducted and substantial outcomes during project YEAR
3. Specifically, the following activities and outcomes are described: 1) Research Plan: qualitative
thematic and narrative findings centered on institutional structure and professional identity
development and constructed from SVSM personal narrative journal entries and one-on-one
narrative interviews, 2) Education Plan: progress to-date oncollaboratively developed and
member-checked military student awareness training for engineering faculty, staff,
administration, and students, and 3) Education Plan: preliminary findings from early activities to
develop an engineering workshop to support SVSM and other post-traditional students navigate
and find community within their engineering degree program.