2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engagement in Practice: Promoting Engineering Work Experiences in Rural Sustainability Contexts

Elizabethtown College, in partnership with the Greenway Institute, collaborated to spearhead a new engineering center, the  Greenway Center.

This paper describes the first pilot of an innovative, community engaged, work-integrated learning program for undergraduate engineering students. The semester-long program includes a 3-week bootcamp and a 12-week work experience where students are participating in work-integrated learning. In this context, work-integrated learning is defined by students' learning experience that is co-facilitated by academic partners at the Greenway Center and industry partners at the students worksites in rural Vermont. During the work-integrated learning session, the students will spend 30-40 hours per week on-site at their job placement and will also have approximately 12-credits coursework. This program is unique in that students were intentionally placed with employers local to the community to promote regional workforce development and build connections with the local engineering employers that students may not otherwise know about or have access to. The short-term goal of this model is to support learning and connections between students’ job placement and their coursework. The longer-term goals of this model include: future work opportunities for students and institutional partnerships with local engineering employers.

From the pilot, several lessons learned include the importance of understanding the needs of local employers, marketing the opportunity to students, and providing meaningful opportunities for students’ engagement both inside and outside of work. Work-integrated learning has significant promise for engineering education in rural community contexts as a way to engage students in meaningful experiences, sustain rural communities and industries, and contribute to regional development goals.

Authors

Sophia Vicente http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1670-0664 Elizabethtown College [biography]

Sophia Vicente (she/her) is currently a Postdoctoral Associate with Elizabethtown College and the Greenway Center for Equity and Sustainability. She has over 6 years of experience studying, teaching, and working alongside engineering students and faculty. Sophia is a former Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and with this background, she is passionate about connecting research, practice, and policy. She holds a PhD in Engineering Education and MEng in Industrial and Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech as well as a BS in Industrial Engineering from Penn State.
Malle R Schilling http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2943-1969 Arizona State University [biography]

Malle Schilling is an Assistant Professor in The Polytechnic School at Arizona State University. Malle’s primary research areas focus on rural engineering education and how rural students access engineering pathways, and community engagement to address wicked problems through collaboration and systems thinking.
Hannah Root
Prof. Annick J Dewald Greenway College [biography]

Dr. Annick Dewald is a founding faculty member of Greenway College. She holds an undergraduate engineering degree from Smith College and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her dissertation research encompassed systems engineering, solar-electric aircraft design, multidisciplinary design optimization, and remote sensing for climate monitoring. Beyond academia, Annick has industry experience at Boeing Research & Technology as well as at Electra.aero, an electric aircraft startup. While working at electra.aero, she expanded upon her dissertation research by leading a team of undergraduate interns to manufacture and flight-test a demonstrator vehicle for the Stratospheric Airborne Climate Observatory System (SACOS). At Greenway College, Annick is integrating her passions for teaching, mentoring, and hands-on engineering experiences to develop and teach Greenway’s reimagined engineering curriculum, which centers sustainability and project-based learning.
Rebecca Holcombe
Dr. Sara A. Atwood Elizabethtown College [biography]

Dr. Sara A. Atwood is the Dean of the School of Engineering and Computer Science and Professor of Engineering at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. She holds a BA and MS in Engineering Sciences from Dartmouth College, and PhD in Mecha

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