2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As engineering institutions update their offerings to respond to our society’s current and future needs, it is imperative to understand how existing programs have prepared students for their post-baccalaureate careers. To ensure preparation, various organizations—from ABET to discipline-specific societies to industry-based organizations—call for engineers to gain specific knowledge, learn skills, and develop mindsets in their four-year programs. While these directives can guide instructors’ learning outcomes in their courses and committees’ department-level evaluations, understanding their impact at an institutional level can be difficult. Further, these guidelines are often too high-level to provide direct, actionable insights to curriculum developers. Detailed alumni perspectives can provide this critical information. To respond to 21st-century challenges, Olin College of Engineering started as a new, four-year program in the early 2000s that offered three distinct engineering degrees. Since then, by focusing on experiential learning, interdisciplinarity, and sociotechnical integration, Olin College has offered a liberal education for engineers. Two decades later, the present study used a mixed methods approach to evaluate how Olin’s undergraduate experience (including the curriculum, extracurriculars, and community) has prepared graduates for their careers. First, the research team conducted 33 semi-structured interviews to build a qualitative understanding of the knowledge, skills, and mindsets alumni frequently use in their current careers and ones developed at Olin. Integrating these findings with those in literature, a list of 45 key skills and mindsets was developed. These items were included in the study’s second stage: a survey sent to Olin College alumni who had graduated in 2009, 2014, 2019, and 2024. Survey items quantitatively measured alumni’ career satisfaction, the degree to which they use the 45 items in their current careers, the degree to which they developed the 45 items during their undergraduate experience, and their perceived development between technical and enduring skills. Participants’ (N = 62; 19.0% of recruited alumni) career paths followed both technical and non-technical paths. 60.% of respondents claimed to be satisfied with their careers while also feeling that they were stronger in their enduring skills than their technical skills upon graduating from Olin College. Of the 45 studied items, alumni reported that their most frequently used items were, on average, teamwork, problem solving, oral communication, and understanding others’ thoughts and ideas. Technical skills were, on average, the least frequently used items in alumni’ current careers when compared to interpersonal skills, mindsets, and high-level thinking items. There existed a positive correlation (r=0.55) between how frequently alumni claim to use the 45 items and how much they developed them at Olin College. This result suggests that the school’s program, which provided a sociotechnical education, prepared graduates well for their careers. This work adds to the collection of compelling evidence that justifies the importance of developing mindsets, interpersonal skills, and high-level thinking skills, in addition to technical skills. Further, the methods described in this work outline an approach that other programs could use to assess their own programs by soliciting alumni perspectives.