2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Together, student veterans and service members (SVSM) are a unique yet understudied group that comprises substantial numbers of those historically underrepresented in engineering based on their race, ethnicity, gender, ability, or sex. That, in combination with technical interests and skills, maturity and life experience, and leadership and teamwork training, makes SVSM ideal candidates for helping engineering education 21st needs for a robust and diverse engineering workforce..

This NSF CAREER project aims to advance full participation of SVSM within higher engineering education and the engineering workforce. The project plan comprises a 1) Research Plan to develop deeper understandings about how SVSM participate, persist, and produce professional identities in engineering education, and an 2) Education Plan to place new understandings into practice through collaborative development, implementation, and broad dissemination of an evidence-based orientation, community building and mentorship workshop for SVSM in engineering, and a set of modularized awareness/support training materials to introduce engineering faculty, staff, and administrators, and the general engineering student populace to military student issues.

The research plan builds from ongoing work using a longitudinal, narrative inquiry research approach and an innovative, two-strand theoretical framework. In doing so, it aims to both critically examine higher engineering education structures and interpretively explore SVSM professional identity development in engineering programs at 2- and 4- year public institutions in the western United States. The research plan is guided by two research questions (RQ):

1. How do SVSM participate and persist in undergraduate engineering education?

a. How do personal and professional assets combine to create SVSM community cultural wealth in engineering?

b. How do SVSM negotiate educational structures to participate and persist in engineering?

2. During their undergraduate engineering education, how do SVSM produce engineering identities?

a. How do SVSM experience transitions between military, civilian, academic, professional, and engineering related contexts?

b. How do SVSM engage in professional identity development?

The education plan draws from design based research approaches and grounded theory methods and. Concurrent with the research plan, the education plan works to connect local theory to practice by characterizing the current support structures available for SVSM in engineering and higher education, and implementing new supports based on SVSM identities and required and preferred resources.

This paper reports on project activities conducted and outcomes achieved during project YEAR 4. Specifically, the following activities and outcomes will be described: 1) Research Plan: a documented analytic process for examining qualitiave data generated from longitudinal narrative data generation, 2) Research Plan: preliminary narrative findings centered on veteran community cultural wealth and professional identity development and constructed from SVSM personal narrative journal entries and one-on-one narrative interviews, 3) Education Plan: outcomes from presenting collaboratively developed and member-checked military student awareness training for VRO and VA collaborators and 4) Education Plan: preliminary findings from first year design-based research activities to develop an engineering onboarding seminar series with SVSM and other post-traditional students in engineering.