Research: Engineering for Social Justice: Factors shaping the career aspirations and mindsets of humanitarian engineers

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Humanitarian Engineering (HE) programs aim to train engineers to improve the health, prosperity, and welfare of underserved and marginalized communities. HE is increasingly desired by students and has the potential to recruit socially attentive students and students from underrepresented minority groups to engineering; however, there is limited research on the career paths of these students after admission. Further, decolonization and social justice reforms are changing the HE sector, and there is a need to understand how career outlooks, including self-efficacy, outcome expectations, career interests, alignment with social justice reform, and retention in the sector, are changing. This project will characterize career aspirations and expectations and identify factors and experiences that influence career pathways and the development of social justice value systems. Comparisons with responses from HE practitioners will help determine how student expectations and goals align or misalign with practitioner reality. As a result, this project will characterize career pathways to help inform students of potential careers post-graduation and needed skill sets in the sector. Additionally, the project will create research-based recommendations for HE educational programs and the sector, identify learning experiences that enable engineering for social justice, and provide reflection for actions that can be taken in the HE sector to retain and support socially-minded engineering practitioners. This project will longitudinally study students from eight HE graduate programs in the United States. The project will focus on career outlooks, including career aspirations, expectations, and self-efficacy. At the same time, we recognize how social justice movements are impacting the field of global engineering, opening up new considerations and pathways for socially minded engineering students that may or may not be aligned with current opportunities in the field. In order to capture these real-time changes and to determine how students’ socially minded career goals align with field realities, we will use mixed-method, longitudinal data to record how these career outlooks change over time and the factors that influence these career outlooks and changes. Longitudinal data will include interviews conducted with students each term, survey questionnaires, and regular discussions in a HE-specific online community maintained by the research team. Analysis of interviews conducted with HE practitioners and compared with student responses will reveal (mis)alignments between career outlooks and realities. The project will not only characterize career trajectories but also advance theory of engineering value system development. Further, by collecting perishable data in this time of social justice reform, the project will also build theory on how social justice movements and mindsets contribute to engineering student outlooks and mindsets. An expert advisory board of faculty from HE graduate programs will help further disseminate results for uptake in programs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.