2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This research paper explores the social connections formed during a variety of faculty development workshops. Since 2019 the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) has been offering Engineering Unleashed Faculty Development (EUFD) workshops to engineering faculty to support the development of entrepreneurial mindset in the faculty participants and their students. EUFD workshops consist of 3 days of in-person engagement followed by a year of coaching and are focused on developing connections between participants and facilitators/coaches and among participants themselves. In this project, we use a survey of EUFD participants to understand the role of connection in their workshop experience. Our research questions are: 1) How many others did participants have meaningful interactions with during the workshops? And 2) What differences in number of meaningful interactions were there between different workshops?

In our survey, participants selected who among their workshop’s participants they had a meaningful interaction with. We then characterized the social connections formed during EUFD workshops using Out Degree and by calculating the number of meaningful connections that were with people who participants met at the workshop (as opposed to having known them prior to the workshop). 83 of the 169 (49%) 2023 EUFD participants that were sent the survey responded. On average, each participant identified 8.83 others with whom they had meaningful interactions and 88% of those connections were people the participants met at the workshop. In a future study, we will examine whether social network characteristics influence the participants’ likelihood of implementing the learning outcomes of the workshop. The preferred presentation mode for this work is a poster.