2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The first year of any engineering program is critical for retention and identity formation. This ‘year’ provides approximately 300 days that can be used to impact the trajectory of each of the engineering students that enroll into our programs. As the body of knowledge in engineering has continually grown, the pressure to achieve meaningful progress within the first year has grown commensurately. At XXX University, we’ve taken a hard look at the two-semester engineering sequence starting with an oft overlooked question – what are we actually trying to accomplish with and for these students? This paper describes the 6-step process that was used to investigate this issue (1. Team-building, 2. Goal Exploration, 3. Curricular Definition, 4. Interventions and Innovations, 5. Outcomes, and 6. Conclusions). Starting with assembling a team of invested faculty, we focused on determining the critical outcomes for the first-year using the collective wisdom of the group leavened with key findings from the relevant literature. With key outcomes at the forefront, it became apparent that defining all of the various steps and activities and estimating the impact of each on the proposed outcomes across a sprawling enterprise that communally served six distinct program was a must. Key interventions and innovative concepts were considered and implemented, leading to specific changes in outcomes. This process was undertaken within an overarching assessment, measuring and metrics mindset – the faculty team and the students were surveyed at multiple key points in this process improvement exercise such that data-informed decision making could be implemented. This work-in-progress paper describes all of these key steps and the leadership and human factors involved and provides lessons learned and conclusions that can be used by other programs to maximize the impact of each of the approximately 300 days in the first year of engineering students.