2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Impact of Engineering Students' Internship Experiences on Career Development

Preparing undergraduate students for future careers and fostering their professional growth are primary goals of higher education. In engineering education, technical coursework builds essential disciplinary knowledge, and internships complement this by providing experiential, practice-based opportunities for students to apply these skills, engage with professional practices, and clarify their career aspirations. Guided by Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) (Lent et al., 1994), which highlights the roles of learning experiences, self-efficacy, and contextual influences in shaping individuals’ career choices and behaviors, this qualitative study explores how internship experiences contribute to the career development of engineering students. As part of a larger project on understanding engineering students’ internship experiences, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 undergraduate students across various engineering majors (15 women and 5 men) to address two research questions:
1. What are engineering students’ overall experiences in professional workplace settings?
2. What contextual factors during internships shape their career development?

Using a combination of deductive analysis, informed by SCCT constructs, and inductive thematic analysis, preliminary findings reveal that participants generally described positive professional experience and perceived increased confidence, along with greater clarity about their career goals. However, notable gender-based differences emerged. Women participants frequently observed the underrepresentation of women in engineering workplaces and emphasized the importance of inclusive environments and support networks. Despite recognizing progress in gender equity initiatives, many expressed the need for sustained cultural change. In contrast, men participants reported smoother integration into workplace cultures and fewer challenges related to belonging.

Authors

Yaning Cao University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Yaning Cao is a PhD student in Human Resource Development at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on students’ career development and how they utilize generative AI in academic and professional contexts.
Rosie Ruoci Shen University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign
Ms. Valeri Werpetinski University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Valeri Werpetinski is a lecturer and co-director of Learning in Community (LINC), an interdisciplinary, inquiry-guided service-learning program in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to this role, she worked as a specialist in Education in instructional development in the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Illinois and served as the director of Curriculum and Service-Learning for the Social Entrepreneurship Institute in the College of Business. She has taught service-learning courses in various disciplines and has collaborated on, and traveled abroad with students participating in, international service-learning projects in engineering. Her professional and research interests are in (international) service-learning, social entrepreneurship, humanitarian engineering, community-engaged scholarship, instructor training and professional development, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Prof. Lawrence Angrave http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9762-7181 University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Dr. Lawrence Angrave is an award-winning computer science Teaching Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He creates and researches new opportunities for accessible and inclusive equitable education.
Prof. Yuting W. Chen http://orcid.org/0009-0002-7513-9712 University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign [biography]

Dr. Yuting W. Chen is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she also leads the Women in Engineering program as the Director. She earned her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2007 and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2009 and 2011, respectively. Her current interests include recruitment and retention of under-represented students in STEM, professional development for graduate students, service-learning, and curriculum innovation in electrical and computer engineering.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

For those interested in:

gender
undergraduate
Academia-Industry Connections
Broadening Participation in Engineering and Engineering Technology