Background: Although prior research has provided robust descriptions of engineering students' identity development, a gap in the literature exists related to students' emotional experiences of shame, which undergird the socially constructed expectations of their professional formation.Purpose: We examined the lived experiences of professional shame among White male engineering students in the United States. We conceptualize professional shame to be a painful emotional state that occurs when one perceives they have failed to meet socially constructed expectations or standards that are relevant to their identity in a professional domain. Method:We conducted unstructured interviews with nine White male engineering students from both a research-focused institution and a teachingfocused institution. We used interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine the interview transcripts.Results: The findings demonstrated four themes related to how participants experienced professional shame. First, they negotiated their global, or holistic, identities in the engineering domain. Second, they experienced threats to their identities within professional contexts. Third, participants responded to threats in ways that gave prominence to the standards they perceived themselves to have failed. Finally, they repaired their identities through reframing shame experiences and seeking social connection. Conclusions:The findings demonstrate that the professional shame phenomenon is interwoven with professional identity development. In experiencing professional shame, White male students might reproduce the shame experience for themselves and others. This finding has important implications for the standards against which members from underrepresented groups may compare themselves and provides insight into the social construction of engineering cultures by dominant groups.
Background: While attrition from the PhD has been attributed to many high-level causal factors, such as funding, advisor relationship, and "fit" into a department, few studies have closely examined the mechanisms of attrition or why and how graduate engineering students begin to consider attrition from their doctoral programs.Design/Method: This study analyzed interviews with current and former doctoral engineering students at research universities across the United States, collected through two closely-related studies on graduate engineering experiences and attrition consideration. We used critical event analysis as a methodological approach to understand the experiences of a subset of 13 participants, who, at some point in their graduate career, experienced a singular event that caused them to question whether to persist in their PhD program.Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of the present paper is to investigate how graduate engineering students begin to question whether they should remain in their PhD programs of study.Results: We categorized the environments in which critical events occurred into four quadrants along the lines of University and Nonuniversity Settings and Routine versus Unexpected Contexts, mapping critical events and supporting events to themes from prior literature. The findings demonstrate how seemingly mundane experiences for faculty can be cataclysmic in the eyes of the student; how critical events serve to magnify other issues that had been accumulating over time; and how students may not self-reflect on their rationale for pursuing a PhD until a critical juncture occurs. Conclusions: Critical events are one mechanism by which students may begin considering departure from their engineering PhD programs. Some critical events masquerade within mundane contexts, like conversations or conferences (although, in retrospect, students can identify other relevant features contributing to dissatisfaction). From this work, we provide implications geared toward administrators, advisors, and graduate students on how to address and potentially mitigate critical events or their effects, including engaging in conversations about leaving.
University. He is the lead investigator of the Beyond Professional Identity (BPI) lab, which conducts research that is aligned with unpacking psychological experiences of identity in professional domains. Additionally, James directs multiple student projects that use human-centered design in the context of community engagement. James received his Ph.D. in engineering education and his M.
Background: While previous work in higher education documents the impact of high tuition costs of attending graduate school as a key motivator in attrition decisions, in engineering, most graduate students are fully funded on research fellowships, indicating there are different issues causing individuals to consider departure. There has been little work characterizing nonfinancial costs for students in engineering graduate programs and the impact these costs may have on persistence or attrition.Purpose/Hypothesis: Framed through the lens of cost as a component of the expectancy-value theory framework and the graduate attrition decisions (GrAD) model conceptual framework specific to engineering attrition, the purpose of this article is to characterize the costs engineering graduate students associate with attending graduate school and document how costs affect students' decisions to persist or depart. Design/Method: Data were collected through semistructured interviews with 42 engineering graduate students from R1 engineering doctoral programs across the United States who have considered, are currently considering, or have chosen to depart from their engineering PhD programs with a master's degree. Results: In addition to time and money, which are costs previously captured in research, participants identified costs to life balance, costs to well-being, and identify-informed opportunity costs framed in terms of what "could have been" if they had chosen to not go to graduate school. As these costs relate to persistence, students primarily identified their expended effort and alreadyincurred costs as the primary motivator for persistence, rather than any expected benefits of a graduate degree. Conclusion:The findings of this work expand the cost component of the GrAD model conceptual framework, providing a deeper understanding of the
Shame provides a key mechanism of social inclusion and exclusion in engineering contexts. In order to better understand how engineering students experience shame, we used interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to critically examine the individual experience of shame in the case of a high-performing, White woman who was a junior mechanical engineering major at a faith-based university (n=1). In particular, we attended to the complex relationship between personal expectations that formed the context for her shame experiences: achieving excellence in performing tasks while maintaining strong social relationships with others. We discuss the implications of this single case study on broader narratives of inclusion in the context of engineering education.
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