2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Being and Becoming an Engineer: How Generative AI Shapes Undergraduate Engineering Education

Presented at Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division (LEES) Technical Session 3: Identity, Professionalization, and Belonging II

This paper presents preliminary findings from the first year of a longitudinal study on how undergraduates in engineering programs at a large Midwestern R1 institution use Generative AI (GenAI) and view its role in their education. Based on surveys and interviews with first-year and upper level undergraduates enrolled in engineering degree earning programs, we explore how GenAI technologies influence the iterative process of developing engineering expertise and identity. While faculty discussions around GenAI often focus on controlling its use, student perspectives – how and why they use GenAI – remain under examined. Early findings suggest students see GenAI as a helpful but limited tool. However, its broader social, cultural, and technical impacts on engineering education are still unfolding. Identity and expertise are evolving practices shaped within a network of human and technological actors. Understanding how GenAI reshapes these processes is essential for developing student-centered pedagogies, policies, and practices related to GenAI.

Authors

Dr. Clay Walker University of Michigan [biography]

Dr. Walker is a Lecturer III in the University of Michigan's College of Engineering Technical Communication Program. He regularly teaches first-year, intermediate, and senior writing courses for students in all engineering disciplines, but especially Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science Engineering. His research focuses on the interplay between identity, experience, and agency in language and literacy practices, with a focus on style and the development of expertise in AI literacies.
Dr. Mariel Krupansky University of Michigan [biography]

Mariel Krupansky is a Lecturer III in the Program in Technical Communication in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. Dr. Krupansky taught a variety of composition and rhetoric courses in the English Department at Wayne State University from 2016-2022, and has been teaching technical communication in a range of engineering disciplines since starting as a Lecturer at the University of Michigan in 2023. Their research interests include social justice in technical communication, the rhetoric of health and medicine, queer/feminist methodologies, and antiracist writing pedagogy.
Dr. Robin Fowler http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6161-0986 University of Michigan [biography]

Robin Fowler is a Technical Communication lecturer and a Engineering Education researcher at the University of Michigan. Her teaching is primarily in team-based engineering courses, and her research focuses on equity in communication and collaboration as well as in group design decision making (judgment) under uncertainty. She is especially interested in how power relationships and rhetorical strategies affect group judgment in engineering design; one goal of this work is to to understand factors that inhibit full participation of students who identify with historically marginalized groups and investigate evidence-based strategies for mitigating these inequities. In addition, she is interested in technology and how specific affordances can change the ways we collaborate, learn, read, and write. Teaching engineering communication allows her to apply this work as she coaches students through collaboration, design thinking, and design communication. She is part of a team of faculty innovators who originated Tandem (tandem.ai.umich.edu), a tool designed to help facilitate equitable and inclusive teamwork environments.
Kenneth M. Alfano http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0446-8140 University of Michigan [biography]

Teaching Professor in Engineering Undergraduate Education and Technical Communication
Colleen Hart University of Michigan

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

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For those interested in:

1st Generation
engineering
information technology
undergraduate