2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The choice of academic major is a critical juncture in a student’s academic and professional journey, however, this selection is frequently made uninformed and under uncertainty, leading to some declared major students having an increased risk of attrition when compared to undecided students[1]. A major decision is often a multifaceted and intricate process that is heavily influenced by different behavioral, sociological, and economic factors such as personal interests, familial background, and financial considerations [1,2]. Despite these findings, a gap remains to explore why undergraduate engineering students choose a particular engineering major.

To address this topic, this NSF IUSE funded project aims to better understand engineering students' decision-making process when selecting their academic major across two large public land-grant universities. The study utilizes an intervention of an online major exploration tool followed by a questionnaire to collect quantitative and qualitative data.

We have previously reported on the development of our survey and interview results [3,4]. The results and understandings obtained from previously published results were used as the basis for designing a new major exploration tool. The online major exploration tool was made available to students enrolled in ENG 100: Introduction to Engineering on both campuses in their first semester. After using the tool, students were provided a questionnaire to provide feedback and insights on the tool.

Results from the post-tool use survey indicated that 80% of students were satisfied with the majors that the tool presented as a match and 50% said that they felt more confident in their major choice as a result of using the tool. Open-ended feedback included students’ appreciation of being able to compare majors side-by-side, the ability to consider specific curricular differences between majors like the number of math courses, access to linked-in profiles from graduates of the program to explore their career paths, and students’ desire for more comparisons of majors, even outside of engineering. The findings will allow us to better understand students’ considerations as they go through the critical process of choosing an academic major.