2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Background This university is an undergraduate-focused, Baptist-heritage, liberal arts school of opportunity that serves its local rural community in the shadow of a large institution with a well-known engineering program. Ten years ago, a School of Engineering was started to diversify offerings and meet the needs of the local manufacturing and pharmaceutical industry. The program’s philosophy has been to focus on evidence-based best practices in engineering to offer opportunities to underserved populations, including rural, first-generation, and mathematically underprepared students. All engineering programs implicitly teach the values of engineering as embodied by the faculty, staff, and programmatic offerings. The School of Engineering has chosen to examine these values and explicitly teach these concepts. As part of the development of the program, eight values were identified as core to the department, values that all graduate should embody. These values are community, professionalism, ownership, relevance, resilience, ethics, excellence, and service. The curriculum and co-curricular activities like second and third year student awards have been infused with the values both explicitly and implicitly, leveraging best practices to create industry-ready students that are highly sought after by employers.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to share how the values have been embedded and influenced the evolution of the School of Engineering during the first ten years of an engineering program in a small, rural, teaching-focused liberal arts institution.
Methodology/Approach This paper is a retrospective case study looking at how the values are integrated throughout the entire program and have shaped the development of the curriculum and curricular activities. Documents and artifacts have been reviewed to support the faculty narrative.
Findings/Conclusions Students recognize the School of Engineering values. The values are strongly and explicitly included across the curriculum. The inclusion of and focus on values in addition to technical content has supported the School of Engineering student population, graduating high-quality students who are well prepared for their future careers.
Implications Explicitly calling out the values that graduating engineers are expected to embody helps to prepare them for the future. It also helps faculty and students to recognize what is important in engineering.