2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This Work-in-Progress paper discusses preliminary data from a study of undergraduate engineering students who viewed curated videos of alumni offering advice on early career engineering and perspectives on post-graduation life. The study intends to investigate whether the videos can improve students’ understanding of the realities of early career engineering and can promote their ability to visualize their future professional selves. The study includes a pre-survey, video viewing, a post-survey, and semi-structured interviews with some of the participants. This paper presents some data from the post-survey.

This paper focuses on the impact of the video series as a means of communication from the alumni speakers to the student viewers. The paper presents scholarship on the use of videos in education and other fields. As a medium, the video series can convey representational role modeling as it delivers content. Preliminary data from 121 participants suggest the videos’ content was impactful and that the visual nature of videos can prompt strong reactions among students. The distribution of student ratings for the most and the least meaningful videos suggests that certain topics resonate with students, but this data needs to be explored further in light of the students’ qualitative explanations for their selections and their demographic data. For instance, the video "Women in Engineering," ranked highly as a selection for both the most and least meaningful video. Students' ratings of the importance of speakers' perceived identities—including race, gender expression, socioeconomic background, and major within engineering— highlight the varying significance students placed on the qualities, and they will be analyzed further in future work. Overall, the preliminary data suggest that the curated video series resonates with students on multiple levels, including the meaningfulness of the alumni advice and the representation of the alumni themselves. The model of a curated video series is scalable and transferrable to other types of institutions and diverse student populations.