2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Research Methods and Project Execution was launched in 2015 to provide Chemical Engineering graduate students at [redacted] with consistent instruction on transferable or transdisciplinary skills including project management, research skills and teamwork within research environments. The course combines activity-based instruction and consistent peer-to-peer discussion and feedback , emphasizing the value of communicating about one’s research as central to refining and improving one’s research goals and approach. Our course development was informed by significant stakeholder engagement, including graduate student focus groups, review of data from alumni surveys and discussion with graduate supervisors from across the department. While this engagement was central to our original vision of the course, continued community involvement has helped to further its development, as we have launched a faculty-wide offering and an online repository of course activities and resources, and continued to refine our course topics and methods.

An alumni interview assignment, which challenges students to learn more about graduate-level experiences, resources and skills that inform engineering work in industry provides an important tool to maintain the currency of this course. In the assignment, students identify an alumnus (from our institute or a comparable program) whose career path they find interesting and conduct an interview that focuses on the resources and opportunities that helped them succeed in their post-graduate career, as well as the types of activities or strategies that they feel would have been helpful in retrospect. Following the interview students share their findings in a 5-minute presentation and via a written summary.
The data from these interviews, which have now been conducted with 152 working engineers, provide important insights into the skills that alumni locate post factum as most central to their success. Coding for the first two years of this data identified the importance of non-technical and transferable skills, including perseverance, teamwork and communication . We will conduct a qualitative content analysis of the complete data set to identify prominent skill categories and related activities. This data will provide valuable information on the experiences that help graduate students develop these skills alongside their technical expertise. This paper will describe this assignment as a model for evidence-informed course development, by detailing the assignment, summarizing and analyzing the data from the alumni interviews, and sharing how this has informed our course development.

[1] D. Boud and A. Lee, “‘Peer learning’ as pedagogic discourse for research education,” Studies in Higher Education, vol. 30, no. 5, October 2005, pp. 501-516.
[2] Redacted