2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This is a Work-in-Progress study that was initiated to explore the impressions that early college students have about what engineers do through the examination of student-generated short narratives. We also wanted to learn more about how engineering curricula have influenced their impressions, and why many of them have abstract understandings of what it is that engineers actually do, with activity simply described as “problem solving”. At this early stage in their education, their impressions of the discipline are less likely to be experience-based, relying instead on courses, media, and interactions within their social and family circles.

Many research studies have explored how students form an engineering identity and sense of belonging through a number of factors. However, in the literature, we find that the longstanding reputation that engineers are problem solvers may interfere with constructive problem definition and a lack of awareness of a problem’s impact of possible solutions on society, including, for example, economic, social, cultural, and environmental factors.

It would be appropriate to state that most early college engineering students obtain many of their impressions of engineering from outreach programs and STEM-based courses on the secondary and higher education levels. Some students may develop a broader view of engineering through technical internships or cooperative experiences, but these opportunities are generally available only after the first or second year of college, when they have already committed to the engineering path. Therefore, we challenge the faculty of introductory engineering courses to consider how their courses can further enrich students’ understanding of what engineers do, through brief activities.

Before we could recommend modifications to the teaching of engineering at the early college level, we needed to find out more how students describe what engineers do and what might have contributed to their impressions. Consider the following research question:

How do we design a prompt for a short activity about what engineers do that elicits a rich response from first-year students?

We administered the following question to approximately 100 students at the beginning of the semester as part of an in-class exit survey: How would you describe what an engineer does?

We noted that most of the responses to this question were almost entirely abstract, without any specific actions, explanations, or richness. Therefore, we have designed a comparative study between this question and another brief imagination-based question, intended for the end of the course and designed to produce a more rich response. This question seeks to make the idea of what an engineer does to be more concrete and relatable, and uses the following prompt:

Write a brief story that shows what an engineer does (4-5 sentences). We encourage you to use your intended career for inspiration.

Both sets of responses will be compared to those from the first question to determine which method of inquiry was more effective in prompting students to think about the specifics of what an engineer does. The comparison will focus on richness in the responses through analysis of verb selection. Our results can then be used to inform the improvement of our course content to better reflect the reality of engineering work. We also expect to use our results as a starting point for further exploration into specific aspects of imagination-based prompt design to encourage reflective thinking in first-year students about working as an engineer, before they have gained much engineering experience.