2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Civil Engineering and the Entrepreneurial Mindset – Cultivating Teaching Practices that Enhance Entrepreneurial Minded Learning

The entrepreneurial mindset (EM) is a set of attitudes and behaviors providing a unique and powerful approach to problem-solving, innovation, and value creation. Engineering programs across the country spanning many disciplines have increasingly incorporated EM principles into undergraduate curricula – entrepreneurial minded learning (EML) – demonstrating success in cultivating these attitudes and behaviors. However, adoption of EML into civil engineering curricula has lagged. Civil engineering students and faculty alike struggle to see the immediate applications of an entrepreneurial mindset. While other engineering disciplines develop prototypes and complete physical tests on products and “inventions,” civil engineers can not do that in most cases, given the larger scale of their constructions. Rather, within the civil engineering community, the common interpretation of EML is that the skills and attitudes are only applicable to those starting a design firm or construction company. To the contrary, EML promotes and encourages students to approach complex civil engineering problems with curiosity in pursuit of innovative solutions, draw connections between design challenges and the community that each project serves, and develop solutions that create value across all domains of sustainability.

A new faculty development workshop has been created to demonstrate how the entrepreneurial mindset can be incorporated into common courses across a civil engineering curriculum, specifically structural engineering. The workshop includes EML activities relevant to statics, mechanics of materials, dynamics, structural analysis, steel design, reinforced concrete design, and structural dynamics. This paper summarizes the details of two iterations of the workshop and each of the associated modules. The paper also includes a summary of pre and post assessments of the faculty participants from both workshop cohorts. The assessments include evaluation of each participants’ active learning practices and their incorporation and understanding of EM principles.

Authors

Dr. Matthew D. Lovell P.E. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology [biography]

Dr. Matthew Lovell is a Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and he currently serves as the Senior Director of Institutional Research, Planning, and Assessment. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University, and he holds his PE license in Indiana. Matt is very active with respect to experimentation in the classroom. He greatly enjoys problem-based learning and challenge-based instruction. Matt is a co-lead facilitator for KEENs Faculty Development Workshop: Embedding an Entrepreneurial Mindset in Civil Engineering. Matt is the 2018 recipient of the American Concrete Institute’s Walter P. Moore, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award. He was awarded Teacher of the Year for the Illinois Indiana section of ASEE in 2017. Also, he was awarded the Daniel V. Terrell Outstanding Paper Award from ASCE. Matt is highly active in ASEE, and he is a past Division Chair of the Civil Engineering Division of ASEE. In 2014, Matt received the ASEE CE Division Gerald R. Seeley Award for a paper highlighting a portion of his work regarding the development of a Master’s Degree at Rose-Hulman.
Dr. Chris Carroll P.E. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9250-8503 Saint Louis University [biography]

Dr. Carroll is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Department of Civil Engineering at Saint Louis University. His experimental research interests focus on reinforced and prestressed concrete, while his educational research interests focus primarily on the use of experiential learning techniques.
Dr. Matthew K Swenty P.E. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1166-3817 Virginia Military Institute [biography]

Matthew (Matt) Swenty obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees in Civil Engineering from Missouri S&T and then worked as a bridge designer at the Missouri Department of Transportation. He then went to obtain his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Virginia Tech followed by research work at the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center on concrete bridges. He is currently a professor of civil engineering and the Jackson-Hope Chair in Engineering at VMI. He teaches engineering mechanics, structural engineering, and introduction to engineering courses and enjoys working with his students on bridge related research projects and the ASCE student chapter. His research interests include engineering licensure policies, civil engineering curriculum development, and the use of innovative materials on concrete bridges.
Dr. Charles Riley P.E. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7993-437X Oregon Institute of Technology [biography]

Dr. Riley has been teaching mechanics concepts for over 10 years and has been honored with both the ASCE ExCEEd New Faculty Excellence in Civil Engineering Education Award (2012) and the Beer and Johnston Outstanding New Mechanics Educator Award (2013).
Dr. David Weston Johnstone P.E. Ohio Northern University [biography]

David W. Johnstone received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from The University of Akron in 2009. During that time, he worked as a consulting engineer for Envital, Ltd. and taught part-time at Youngstown State University. Following graduation, he taught

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025