2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering education scholars have identified a wide range of factors that influence the growth of an undergraduate student’s professional identity as an engineer, including internship experience, club participation, grades or other academic achievements, social interactions with peers, and family tradition. These experiences contribute to students viewing themselves as engineers prior to graduating and entering the workforce. At the same time, several factors have been known to discourage students from pursuing or continuing to study engineering. These factors, which include cultural and socioeconomic background, race, gender, and sexual orientation, can affect a student’s sense of community and belonging in engineering and other STEM fields. In this paper, we discuss the pivotal moments, significant relationships, and social interactions that participants used to anchor their engineering identities. These anchors serve as foundational reference points on which engineering identity is iteratively built and assessed. Our findings offer valuable insights into the commencement of engineering identity development, contributing to our understanding of this important, complex, and dynamic process.