2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Student Pathways in Engineering and Computing for Transfers (SPECTRA) program is an NSF S-STEM that recruits low-income transfer students from technical colleges into engineering and computing degrees at Clemson University. The program provides student scholarships and promotes peer connections through participation in undergraduate research. Multiple SPECTRA scholars have graduated from Clemson and have since pursued career and graduate school opportunities. Our previous research has focused on students' perceptions of their experience in the program, demonstrating that participants have found value in building peer relationships, engaging with undergraduate research, and reducing financial stress. The goal of an undergraduate degree is to prepare students to achieve their intended careers, or career outcome expectations. Our current work aims to reconnect with students who have graduated and examine how the goals and values they expressed during their time in SPECTRA align with their post-graduate experiences. Through this work, we hope to gain insight into how the goals and values of the participants have changed post-graduation and to determine what aspects of the SPECTRA program were influential during their transition to pursuit of careers and graduate schools. We will use qualitative methodologies to compare interview data collected while students were still in the program to their LinkedIn profiles, to see if their current careers reflect their pre-graduation aspirations. Additionally, we will contact graduated students for follow-up interviews, focusing on the outcomes of their job/graduate school search, the fulfillment they have in their current positions, how their goals or interests have changed since graduation, and the impact participation in the SPECTRA program had on their current situation. We hope that connecting with the participants after graduation will enhance our understanding of how transfer students' career goals and motivations evolve and the long-term values of the SPECTRA program. The funding for the SPECTRA program is coming to an end, and the research team intends to compile a set of “lessons learned” that will be used to inform the design of a new S-STEM proposal at Clemson University. The personal experiences of the graduated students will provide insight into what the participants believe are the greatest benefits of the program and how their participation impacted their academic and career experience. Based on the responses, those developing the new proposal can ensure that the aspects that students find most valuable will remain intact and the aspects that they found lacking are removed or changed to better support students' needs. In this paper, we discuss our approach to collecting and analyzing the graduated participants' data, including the challenges we have encountered in our methods and preliminary findings.