2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Undergraduate engineering in the United States is characterized by many opportunities and obstacles within and beyond the classroom [1]. The exact nature of these opportunities and obstacles may differ across demographic identities [2], [3], [4] and institution types [5], [6], [7]. During the fifth year of this NSF CAREER project, we engaged demographically marginalized undergraduate engineering students nationwide to understand better how they navigate undergraduate engineering in different contexts. In this poster, we will showcase our findings from interviewing upper-division engineering students and deploying a Situational Judgment Inventory (SJI) at multiple universities across the United States.

We collected data using semi-structured virtual interviews. We interviewed over 45 undergraduate engineering students. Data analysis of the completed interviews is ongoing. The goal of this analysis is to determine the role an institution plays in the navigation of opportunities and obstacles in engineering. We are also interested in the similarities of student experience for those facing excessive obstacles in engineering.

For the education plan of this CAREER project, we developed the Engineering Student Preferences in Navigating (E-SPIN) SJI containing 19 scenarios related to the obstacles and opportunities commonly encountered in engineering and various ways to respond. During the past year, we developed a public website to disseminate E-SPIN to students across the country. In this paper, we discuss students’ and practitioners' experience interacting with E-SPIN.