2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress paper describes the development and pilot of a survey to measure factors that inform engineering graduate student field choice, with a focus on disciplinary engineering role identity development, turnover intentions (i.e., intentions to leave their degree), and sense of belonging. While many studies have demonstrated the importance of engineering identity development to the retention and sense of belonging of undergraduate students, less work has examined graduate student engineering identity development. Prior work with graduate students has noted the multiplicity of role identities, including as an engineer, researcher, and scientist; however, this work did not explore discipline-specific nuances in engineering identities. Importantly, many graduate students within engineering undergo a disciplinary transition between their undergraduate and graduate program enrollment (e.g., moving from chemical engineering into biomedical engineering), which may impact students’ sense of belonging in their graduate fields.

The survey will leverage an existing framework of engineering role identity using constructs of recognition, interest, and performance/competence beliefs, as well as additional measures of belonging and turnover intentions. The items will be adapted to draw on discipline-specific engineering role identity, as compared to general engineering identity. Graduate students will be asked to reflect on both their undergraduate and graduate disciplinary role identity to investigate whether individuals who choose to switch fields at the transition between undergraduate and graduate education experience differing strengths of general and discipline-specific engineering role identity across their academic careers. A pilot study is underway with a small number of respondents who completed undergraduate degrees in engineering and are currently pursuing an engineering graduate degree. To better understand the factors that inform graduate program choice, semi-structured interviews will be conducted with a subset of respondents to refine the survey items and better understand which identities and beliefs are most salient to measure. During the pilot phase, we anticipate that survey items will be changed in accordance with respondent feedback to better capture identity formation across undergraduate and graduate engineering education. The outcome of this work will be a survey with validity evidence that will be deployed nationally in a subsequent study. By examining differences in identities, intentions, and belonging between graduate students who maintain the same degree pathways in the transition to graduate study and those who do not, this work can inform both understanding of identity theory for graduate education and support the development of field-specific interventions for students at the graduate level.