2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Career readiness in STEM involves the acquisition of a set of skills named '21st century skills'. Experiential learning has been reported to help promote these skills in students more effectively than the traditional instructional methods such as lecturing. Additionally, role models have been noted as important figures in students’ acquisition of career readiness. Lastly, career readiness has been observed to vary across student race or gender.

The New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program was launched at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in fall 2017. This three-year, cross-departmental undergraduate experiential learning program engages its undergraduate students in interdisciplinary, hands-on project work with frequent involvement of faculty or industry, with the aim of improving career readiness among its alumni.

In the current study, we analyze NEET and another experiential learning program at MIT, a shorter program (one or two semesters) that has existed for over fifty years, Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). UROP is attended by 93% of undergraduate students at MIT.

The goal of this paper is to analyze the NEET program’s contribution to career readiness as well as that of UROP, as reported by alumni of both programs and as pertaining to their time at MIT. We specifically looked at two interdisciplinary tracks, termed 'threads', in NEET: Autonomous Machines, and Living Machines. These are NEET's founding threads and the largest out of the four threads in the program.

Our research questions were as follows:

1. What is the importance of each 21st century skill to participants’ career readiness?
2. What are the differences in the respective contributions of NEET and UROP to participants’ 21st century skill development and how do they complement each other?
3. What kind of and how many role models did participants encounter in NEET and UROP?
4. Are there other factors such as the participants’ college major, gender, race, or NEET thread that might also affect students’ 21st century skill development?

According to survey respondents, NEET enhanced their interpersonal skills, highlighting the need for diverse learning formats to address various skill sets. Significant gender and thread differences were observed in creativity, engineering design, and systems thinking, influenced by thread composition and curriculum. Career readiness outcomes were positive, emphasizing the value of experiential learning. While strengths included collaboration and problem-solving, gaps in entrepreneurship, experimentation, and intercultural understanding suggest opportunities for curriculum enhancements, particularly in global and interdisciplinary contexts.

Future engineers should possess a combination of disciplinary specialization and cross-disciplinary competencies. This vision requires achieving a flexible balance between fundamental, generalist, and specialized elements in the curriculum. With program X, the institution aims to help move its undergraduate engineering education offering towards such a balance.