2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This WIP inform practice paper presents a semester-long first-year engineering leadership course, in which students participate in interactive seminars and apply their learnings through a community-engaged team project. Working in cross-disciplinary teams, students develop STEM lessons for a K-12 audience under the guidance of pre-service teachers. These projects allow students to actively contribute to the local community while improving teamwork and leadership skills. Additionally, the instructor provides mentorship, offering resources and opportunities for leadership development beyond the classroom.
The leadership course is part of the Grainger First-Year Experience program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, designed to provide a small-cohort experience for first-year engineering students. Participants are selected through an application process, in which they identify a topic for further development. Most students enrolled in the course have prior leadership experience, having served as team leaders in various high school activities. The course focuses on leadership development through weekly interactive seminars, with guest speakers from different campus units sharing their areas of expertise. To apply their learning, students form cross-disciplinary teams so that they are working with peers from various engineering majors. Each team, mentored by a pre-service teacher, develops an interactive K-12 STEM lesson, concluding in a lesson delivery and final presentation at the end of the semester.
Preliminary findings reveal that students were more enthusiastic about their team projects compared to the earlier seminars and reflections, despite the additional time commitment needed outside of class. They highly valued the opportunity to engage with the local community and had a deeper appreciation for the effort put in by their instructors after going through the process of creating and delivering a lesson themselves.
This course can serve as a practical template for universities looking to develop or pilot leadership programs for first-year engineering students, particularly those with limited resources. The course’s structure demonstrates how to effectively foster leadership skills and community engagement without requiring extensive resources.