2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Undergraduate engineering schools aim to prepare their students to join the engineering workforce and to see themselves as engineers. In engineering schools, students not only acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for the workforce but also start to participate in engineering culture through forms of identity work that help them find their positions in engineering. Figuring out what kind of career trajectories they want to pursue after college is an important part of this identity work because this process reflects the values they construct regarding what engineering is and how they want to participate.

Especially with the increasing emphasis on the sociotechnical aspect of engineering in the curricula, students are vocalizing their aspirations for a more humanizing, equitable, and justice-oriented engineering, one that works with communities, not on them. However, through the limited contact points with the industry, the industry mostly projects to them as technocentric, capitalist, neglectful of issues of justice, and unattentive to its impact on the communities. These images of engineering life in industry leave students to navigate tensions between their emerging engineering identities and their sense of engineering industry culture.

Through the analysis of in-depth interviews with 6 engineering students, I studied the nature of the tensions students experience as part of the identity work they do imagining their future in engineering. I identified 4 themes in these tensions: misalignment in the mission of the work, challenges to finding a role that makes an impact, epistemological differences, and absence of support in navigating career possibilities.

This study will serve as a foundational step for institutions like engineering schools to make space and design ways to support students’ identity work. It also calls for the engineering industry to listen to the voices of to-be engineers and construct a more equitable future together with them.