From website to work environment: Exploring minority undergraduate engineering students’ conceptualizations of engineering careers
Conference
Campbell, A, Villatoro, VC, Lopez, AA et al. (2023). From website to work environment: Exploring minority undergraduate engineering students’ conceptualizations of engineering careers
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Campbell, A, Villatoro, VC, Lopez, AA et al. (2023). From website to work environment: Exploring minority undergraduate engineering students’ conceptualizations of engineering careers
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Within engineering education, there have been rising calls for more research on the transitional period students face leading up to graduation (e.g., post-graduation planning) and moving into the next phase of their career. This study seeks to complement existing research by exploring the experience of students as they seek to make sense of engineering career pathways and make decisions about engineering positions. To this end, we investigate how minority undergraduate engineering students conceptualize engineering career pathways based on an organization’s website content. We, a team of minority undergraduate engineering students, led a qualitative analysis of the websites of two national labs: Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC). The website content was analyzed by extracting excerpts that matched keywords related to engineering careers. Each excerpt was annotated with our impression of the company as a potential employer. In collaboration with other researchers, a codebook was developed based on contemporary career frameworks and was used to assign primary and secondary codes to each of our perceptions. The results illustrated how we viewed both labs as committed to providing employees with a good work-life balance, as well as opportunities for both personal and professional growth. The insights from our study can provide organizations and higher education institutions with a deeper understanding of how this generation of engineering graduates makes sense of engineering career pathways. These results can also aid engineering programs in helping students navigate post-graduation planning. Future work on students’ perception of engineering careers is necessary for furthering potential employers and institutions understanding of their workforce.
