2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Due to the need for collaboration among experts with different backgrounds to tackle the significant socio-technical challenges of the 21st century, calls are frequently made to increase the diversity of engineering. Women and under-represented minority (URM) students in STEM disciplines often face unwelcoming, discriminatory, and biased campus and classroom environments, which adversely affect their academic performance, interest, persistence, and sense of belonging in their disciplines. Additionally, URM STEM students often report feeling invisible and culturally irrelevant and experiencing negative classroom stereotypes. Many of these students choose to self-isolate [1] or drop out due to challenges unrelated to their abilities [2]. In addition, some recent studies show higher levels of self-reported anxiety and stress among women and first-generation students compared to their peers in engineering. These experiences are also correlated with how they identify with being an engineer [3].

In this paper, we employed a qualitative approach to report and examine self-beliefs and perceptions of engineering and what engineers do among URM engineering students in their senior year. The research outcome serves as a venue to voice these students' views of engineering, some of whom reported a lack of sense of strong belonging to the community of engineers, that might be related to the systematic barriers they face.

The study is a work-in-progress and part of a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF). The NSF RIEF project intends to investigate the prevalence and disagreement patterns, illuminating how Engineering Identity (EI), gender, and other student-specific variables (demographics, transfer student, etc.) explain the likelihood of a student disagreeing on tasks, processes, and other teamwork constructs. It provides evidence on what behaviors are linked to stronger EI and which team dynamics (or disagreement patterns) promote EI development among diverse students. The study was conducted at a primarily undergraduate and Hispanic-serving institution in the Western US.

The research outcome highlights some aspects of engineering that URM students relate to or have more difficulty aligning with, potentially due to the systematic barriers in the engineering culture. Since identification with engineering may not be stagnant in time and space, this study further emphasizes the need for and importance of designing interventional and culturally relevant practices to improve the college experiences of women and URM students and enhance their sense of belonging and persistence in the profession, ultimately contributing to a more diverse and inclusive STEM workforce.