2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering identity has been established as a key predictor of recruitment to and persistence through engineering degree programs. Many students who find that their own identity, the beliefs they hold about who they are and what they want to achieve, is incongruent with their perception of who or what an engineer is ultimately leave engineering programs to pursue other fields of study where the alignment is stronger. However, for a variety of reasons, some students continue to pursue an engineering degree and enter a process of identity negotiation, where they seek to align their personal and professional identities. This negotiation causes adjustment on both sides of the tension to who they believe they are and/or how they make sense of being an engineer.

As a part of a larger study focused on the impact of first-year engineering (FYE) programs on the development of communities of practice and engineering identity, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 students in each of the three years following their FYE experience. The students were from two different research-intensive institutions, one with a first-year engineering program and one with a discipline specific (or direct matriculation) approach. These interviews focused on the communities that the students saw themselves a part of, as well as how they viewed themselves as engineers. Using this longitudinal perspective, we focus this paper on a subset of those students who saw their identities as incongruous to engineering and underwent an individual process of identity negotiation. For these students, they ultimately found their niche within the engineering field; however, we know for many students that is not the case. We believe the findings for this work can seed future interventions that aid students in their identity negotiation process.

In this paper, we examine the experiences of these students throughout their college experiences and how they negotiated their identity within engineering, as well as provide some insights into causes of identity incongruence driven by systems level institutional choices. The student experiences are used to inform recommendations to support students who find their identity to be misaligned with their perception of engineering. We particularly aim these recommendations at new engineering educators who often interact with students in cornerstone courses and other critical, early-degree engineering courses. We believe the findings have the potential to impact engineering undergraduate education holistically leading to additional practicing engineers.