2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering students often take either primarily general education courses or participate in a first-year engineering program that combines all disciplines into one course consisting of multiple sections. This structure can dilute the female engineering student population, meaning the students are distributed between multiple sections and courses during the first year. Because of this, female engineering students may be less aware of each other and have fewer opportunities to connect, which can result in feelings of isolation, questioning their sense of belonging, and potentially affecting their retention.

At Louisiana Tech University, a first-year program called Living with the Lab offers an immersive, hands-on, project-based course sequence that focuses on problem-solving and building a strong academic foundation for engineering fundamentals. Equipment like milling machines, soldering irons, and drills are all used within the course sequence. The classroom setup is strategically designed to encourage collaboration through a six-person table layout. Feedback was received that female engineering students often felt intimidated when entering the classroom and underconfident while using the equipment. A workshop that provided female students advanced access to the equipment by working through multiple hands-on activities while also making connections with female faculty, engaging with upper-level female students, and building community with their peers was implemented to address these concerns.

At the beginning of the Fall 2023 academic term, the first INSPIRE Workshop experience for first-term, female engineering students was offered. Nineteen female students participated in the two-day workshop. Survey data on confidence in using the equipment and sense of community were collected. This paper will describe the workshop experience and provide results from the survey data. Results indicate positive statistical significance on the overall confidence in using lab equipment and a sense of community.