2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This complete research paper explores how students in their first and second years of engineering programs and enrolled in a multidisciplinary design-oriented course sequence develop professionally relevant and entrepreneurial mindset (EM)-oriented skills through their coursework. This work is important since students in their first year of engineering programs are commonly concurrently navigating new expectations of what skills and experiences they will need as an engineer and what skills they will need to succeed in college. To support students in both areas, many institutions offer early-degree-program curricula, like the one studied here, to support engineering skill development, career exploration, and academic preparation. Some previous work suggests that skills and behaviors associated with an EM can be particularly helpful for students as they develop in their first years of engineering. The course sequence studied aims to embed entrepreneurially minded learning (EML) throughout the curriculum, but a recent assessment of how EML is showing up for students in the coursework has not been performed. To explore how students are making connections between their professional preparation and EML outcomes, this work incentivised students to reflect weekly on their coursework to identify how it could support their career interests and goals using prompts aimed at gathering outcome data related to an entrepreneurial mindset. We also collected student resume drafts to see if and how they were representing the EM outcomes of their programs.
Students who reflected were asked to respond to one key question, “What is something you learned or did this week in your course that will help you in your career?” and provided three probing questions to help them reflect on what they learned that week. Those questions were: “What sort of value can what you learned bring to a future career? How might what you learned support your ability to make connections to other disciplines you will work with as an engineer? Did what you learn inspire you to look further into the subject? In what ways?”.
We analyzed 263 open-ended responses to the weekly reflections from students in first-year or second-year courses. Using a deductive approach to coding that was guided by concepts relevant to the conceptualization of an entrepreneurial mindset in the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network, we looked for patterns in the kinds of EM outcomes being developed in our courses and the kinds of course-based activities students were demonstrating on their resumes. Beyond providing a robust assessment of how EM develops in early-career design courses, the findings presented demonstrate additional considerations for how to support students in describing their EML outcomes in their professional artifacts.