2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Typically, a large portion of the first year of a student’s undergraduate engineering education is spent on general education courses. Although what satisfies this requirement varies between institutions. ABET’s requirement that programs provide a broad education to accompany the technical components of the curriculum means that engineering programs include general education courses both required and elective to both satisfy the broad education requirement and provide a rich interdisciplinary experience and education to their students. These courses provide both content (e.g. economics, ethics) and skills (e.g. writing, oral presentations) that are useful and necessary for both personal and professional development. However, students can often see these courses as not useful or unrelated to their future careers. In this study, a first semester course in Civil Engineering was designed and delivered to make deliberate and clear the connections between the general education portion of the curriculum and students’ future careers as civil engineers. An existing instrument was adapted to measure student aptitudes towards different skills and knowledge typically presented in general education courses and given to the student pre and post instruction, revealing statistically meaningful increases in the perceived importance of some areas of the general education curriculum.