2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

First-year undergraduate students who are required to select a major during the application process often times have a poor understanding of the topics within their selected major and the breadth of possible career paths. In addition, our civil and environmental engineering curriculum did not provide meaningful engagement for the students until the end of their second year at the institute. Therefore, it was not surprising that the retention of students within the major was as low as 50%. To help students learn more about the CEE field and to begin building their professional identity, a new course was developed for first-year students within civil and environmental engineering. This course has been taught during the fall semester commencing in 2019. The course is designed to be highly interactive meeting one hour a week in a standard lecture format and two hours a week in smaller studio sessions. The course is organized into four modules covering one of the major cross-cutting areas within the program with each module consisting of Learn, Do, and Reflect components. The students work in teams for each module completing a short team project related to the module topic. They also complete a self-reflection exercise at the end of each module as well as a culminating reflection at the end of the course. The course includes material on engineering communication as well as teamwork with academic professionals working with the students during several sessions. The course also introduces story-driven learning components allowing the students to begin to build their professional identity and to see how they fit within the major. Assessment for the effectiveness of the course includes survey data collected throughout each semester. In addition, because the class was originally optional, student retention data compared between the cohort taking the class versus those who have not taken the class over the past 4 years has shown the benefit of the course. Furthermore, a culture survey has shown the benefit that the course has for the students to develop a sense of belonging to the school and their major early in their academic journey. This paper will describe the course development, piloting and offering, considerations to scale up the course to serve all new CEE students, and evaluation of the course to date. The course will also be placed in the context of other first-year engineering courses to highlight the similarities and unique features of a growing number of first-year CEE courses in the U.S.