2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

To enhance design education and encourage retention in engineering, it is recommended to increase students’ engagement with industry professionals. While industry engagement often grows throughout students’ undergraduate years, typically culminating in industry-sponsored capstone projects and summer internships, there is an important opportunity to engage students earlier, such as in their first year, to motivate them and offer valuable perspectives. To fill this gap, we explored the integration of industry mentorship in a first-year project-based engineering design course. Across two course sections, four industry mentors participated in five in-class sessions throughout a 15-week semester, including two formal design reviews, culminating in their role as judges at the engineering college’s design expo. Engaging 63 students, primarily from mechanical, biomedical, and aerospace engineering disciplines, this initiative sought to expose students to professional design practices to validate what they learn in the classroom as valuable and applicable to real-world engineering projects. Data collection included instructor observations and reflections throughout the semester, a focus group discussion with industry mentors, and two student surveys conducted during the middle and end of the program. Results show high student engagement and satisfaction with Industry Mentors (IMs). Students felt that IMs helped them improve their projects in the course, expanded their knowledge and application of the design process, and helped them become better engineers. IMs also expressed personal and professional benefits to mentoring first-year engineering students that can foster connections between academia and industry. We show that the piloted approach effectively engaged first-year engineering students with industry engineers via mentorship, successfully integrating industry perspectives into a first-year project-based engineering design course. Suggestions for improvements to the IM program are also provided.