2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

WIP: Reflections from a Multidisciplinary, Cohort-Based First-Year Seminar for Low-income, Academically Talented First-Year Engineering Students

Presented at First-Year Programs Division (FPD) Work-in-Progress 4: Pathways, Belonging, and Early Experiences

This work-in-progress paper explores student reflections from a multidisciplinary, cohort-based, first-year engineering seminar designed for a cohort of students participating in a scholarship program. This paper offers a brief overview of the Scholarship program, which is designed to support low-income, academically talented engineering students. We offer a description of the scholarship section of the FYE seminar and offer preliminary themes from an analysis of Scholars’ responses to an end-of-class written reflection to address our research question: What is the experience of first-year, low-income, academically talented students in a cohort-based, multidisciplinary first-year engineering seminar? Through our analysis, we aim to cultivate an initial understanding of the Scholars' experience engaging in an FYE seminar as a cohort during their first semester and identify opportunities for improving Scholarship programming.

Authors

Dr. Elizabeth A Sanders The University of Illinois at Chicago [biography]

Dr. Elizabeth A. Sanders is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at University of Illinois Chicago. She holds a Ph.D in Engineering Education (Purdue University, 2024), a M.A. in Higher Education (University of Michigan, 2020), and B.S. in Chemical Engineering (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2018). Her research focuses on human-centered design teaching and learning in the engineering context and empathy in engineering design.
Dr. Miiri Kotche The University of Illinois at Chicago [biography]

Miiri Kotche is the Richard S. Hill Clinical Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago and currently serves as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Affairs in Engineering. Her research interests center on experiential learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, and promoting biomedical engineering through high school science teacher professional development.
Prof. Houshang Darabi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7881-6542 University of Illinois Chicago [biography]

Dr. Houshang Darabi is a Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Darabi’s research focuses on the use of Big Data, process mining, data mining, Operations Research, high performance computing, and visualization in improving educational systems and students’ learning. Dr. Darabi’s research has been funded by federal and corporate sponsors including the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety.

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