Engineering Study Abroad

Successful engineers must be technically savvy, self-confident as well as culturally competent. Cultural competence is the ability to tolerate ambiguity and empathize with the socio-cultural nuances of different people groups. This calls for a diverse engineering workforce especially in today's increasingly global economy. In the United States, Minorities and Females constitute only 4% and 15% of the engineering workforce respectively. Research shows that women and students of color, dropout due to feelings of not belonging coupled with low self-efficacy. To change the profession's diversity portfolio requires a plethora of high impact approaches. Common among successful retention strategies is the provision of structured opportunities for all students to develop self-directing competencies in both the cognitive and affective learning domains. This chapter demonstrates that the study abroad experience engenders, facilitates and fosters these very aptitudes as well as cultural literacy, and advocates for its inclusion in discussions on increasing under-represented participations in engineering.

Minority Recruitment and Retention Among Gifted Students

Consistent with the national goal implemented by our current government, Auburn University is also working to recruit and retain underrepresented minorities in higher education. The rationale for this is simple, that is to allow a greater advantage when competing against others. One of the ways to foster this competition is by nurturing our gifted underrepresented minority students. In the 2010-2011 school year, the Honors College, which serves as a gateway for underrepresented minority students, developed a distinct focus on helping our students reach and their educational/academic goals. Within this paper we will go over some of the steps we have begun to take to reach our goal, in addition to future plans we have to continue these efforts.

Improving Minority Student Persistence

Student persistence in college is a major concern for every institution of higher education. Statistics show that the greatest percentage of attrition occurs after the freshman year. Many studies surrounding this phenomenon tend to focus on pre-college predictors to gain knowledge into mass premature departure during the freshman to sophomore transition. However, very few have looked at institutional factors and how they may explain the problem. Further, most research studies have been done at relatively large and predominantly white institution. This chapter investigates student satisfaction with institutional factors at a small Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Specifically, it looks at how the campus environments may impact freshman students' decisions to return for their sophomore year. While freshman students were dissatisfied with certain aspects of the university they consider to be important, the results precluded good prediction in a practical sense if they influence their decision not to return.

Diversifying Engineering Education

Engineers and therefore engineering education are challenged by the increasing complexity of questions to be answered globally. The education of future engineers therefore has to answer with curriculums that build up relevant skills. This chapter will give an example how to bring engineering and social responsibility successful together to build engineers of tomorrow. Through the integration of gender and diversity perspectives, engineering research and teaching is expanded with new perspectives and contents providing an important potential for innovation. Aiming on the enhancement of engineering education with distinctive competencies beyond technical expertise, the teaching approach introduced in the chapter represents key factors to ensure that coming generations of engineers will be able to meet the requirements and challenges a changing globalized world holds for them. The chapter will describe how this approach successfully has been implemented in the curriculum in engineering of a leading technical university in Germany.

Getting Off the Engineering Enrollment Rollercoaster

Traditionally, petroleum engineering programs trained young professionals for the oil and gas industry. After years, this strong tie made the universities completely dependent on petroleum companies for their student placement and research funding. Similar to the operators and service companies, the universities became sensitive to changes in demand. In the last decade, in response to a rapid increase in crude oil prices and unconventional production, the industry experienced a hiring surge which caused a subsequent agitation among engineering freshmen to claim petroleum engineering as their major. As a result, this short period of high demand for petroleum engineering graduates created tremendous pressure on the departments making them expand beyond their educational capacities. In some cases, that led to doubling of the number of undergraduates. Simultaneously, this rapid expansion of the student enrollment created a growing demand for faculty who are now experiencing serious demographic and research gaps.

Developing a Learning Community of Engineers Through an Honors First-Year Seminar

First-year engineering majors face a myriad of obstacles as they begin college. Taking challenging foundational coursework, navigating new expectations for performance and experience, and understanding the broader impact of their academic interests are just a few of those obstacles. In addition, female students sometimes face additional barriers to success, particularly as some question their own competence in the field. This chapter focuses on a first-year seminar for honors students that highlights the high impact practices (Kuh, 2008) students should participate in throughout their undergraduate career. These practices include global engagement, undergraduate research, and internships that are essential for early exposure to future career interests. By developing both formal and informal learning communities within the seminar (Johnson, Pasquini, & Rodems, 2013), first-year students are exposed to opportunities, mentoring, and support that help them make informed decisions about their major and career.

Empowering Women in STEM

This chapter covers a project that was part of an I3 (Ideas, Innovation, Invention) challenge within a global engineering, junior course at University of Mount Union. The course exposes engineering students to global societal challenges and their solutions. Of importance in this project is the need to boost numbers in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and the need to increase diversity. With this in mind, the team developed and tested five different activities that involved different areas of STEM that were both fun and didactic in nature. Each activity had an associated module to allow for assessment of understanding. An orange buoyancy module, a strength of paper module, a soil erosion module, a simple circuit module, and a simple electric motor module were developed. They were tested on K-5 students at Washington Elementary School, Alliance, OH and on K-5 students at Ollas Arriba Elementary School, Panama City, Panama.

Revisioning the Engineering Profession

Beginning with a brief account of the value of diversity and inclusivity in a globalizing world, this chapter presents an overview of the current situation of the engineering profession in some English-speaking countries. The starting point addresses the enduring difficulty encountered by attempts to increase and diversify professional engineering. Drawing on a series of studies of engineering education, engineering workplaces and people, both in Australia and beyond, this chapter outlines barriers to entering engineering for anybody other than white mainstream males. Access and retention have long been recognized as serious impediments to increasing numbers of women in engineering. The particular breakthrough in this chapter describes the ways in which some Australian women engineers are working to sustain and enrich their professional status within the workplace by developing strategies that enable them to continue as professionals without diminishing other important features of their life worlds. The implications for all sectors of education, and employers, to emerge from this study offer a basis for redesigning engineering as a more diverse and inclusive profession.

Addressing Cultural and Gender Project Bias

Engaged student learning is based on creating significant learning experiences for every student. Attracting a more diverse student body into Engineering requires a re-evaluation of the conventional project topics that dominate the discipline. Recognising and addressing cultural and gender bias in the development of project work allows for the education of Engineering faculty on the development of a range of project work opportunities that support the learning for a more diverse cohort. The selection of set project work has the potential to negatively impact the learning experience of minority students. This chapter considers the elements influencing set project work and provides strategies for understanding cultural and gender bias, and for redesigning project work that provides for a more diverse cohort.

Engineering Pathways in a U.S. Public Institution of Higher Education

This chapter relates a strategy that emerged from a larger effort of a land-grant institution in the U.S. to more rapidly increase the number of international students on campus and diversify its student body through the development and implementation of pathway programs. Pathway students are international students that do not meet the criteria for direct entry into a university due to lower levels of English language proficiency and/or GPA. The authors discuss strategies for ensuring success in these endeavors.