2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In 2020, _____ University initiated a five-year NSF-funded Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) project to transform its environmental engineering program. We hypothesized that engaging students with real, integrated engineering content in the first years of the program would help them build an engineering professional identity (EPI) and improve student retention and success. Two new project-based courses for 1st and 2nd year students in the environmental engineering program were developed and offered for the first time during the 2023 – 2024 academic year. The two courses integrated content on sustainability, professionalism, systems thinking, ethics, and social justice topics, with technical content on engineering design and tools. Surveys were given to the environmental engineering students enrolled in these new 3-credit courses, along with two cohorts of 1st year students in a 1-credit introductory civil engineering course (the control group) who were not enrolled in the new environmental engineering courses. All surveyed students were asked to rank which EPI pillar of Professionalism, Systems Thinking, and Sustainability (as defined by our RED project) was most valued by their field of engineering. A second question asked them to rank the EPI competencies presented – technical knowledge, systems thinking, public policy, management, communication, ethics, teamwork and social justice – according to which ones best prepare(d) them to be an engineer. Students were surveyed at the beginning and end of the semester. This paper presents the extent to which students’ perceptions of the most and least important EPI pillars and competencies changed over the semester. We found that there was little change across all groups with respect to which pillars were most valued, with Sustainability being reported of highest value and Professionalism of lowest value to both Civil Engineering and Environmental Engineering students. For students in the control Civil Engineering course, students’ perceptions of EPI competencies that prepared them most and least for being an engineer, technical knowledge and social justice respectively, did not change over time or across the two cohorts. For Environmental Engineering students, however, there were differences in students’ perceptions between the classes and over time. Students in the 1st year course reported that communication was the most important engineering competency at the beginning of the semester but reported a tie between technical knowledge and systems thinking at the end of the semester. Social justice ranked lowest in both pre- and post-course surveys for 1st year students. At the beginning of the semester, students in the 2nd year course ranked technical knowledge highest and social justice lowest. By the end of the semester in the 2nd year course, ethics ranked highest and management ranked lowest. These results suggest that the RED project-based courses were more effective than the control course at challenging and building upon students’ initial perceptions of engineering values and competencies, and that repeated exposure to integrated project-based courses may enhance this effect.