Career Outcome Expectations Related to Sustainability among Students Intending to Major in Civil Engineering

Shealy, Tripp; Valdes-Vasquez, Rodolfo; Klotz, Leidy; Potvin, Geoff; Godwin, Allison; Cribbs, Jennifer; Hazari, Zahra

doi:10.1061/(asce)ei.1943-5541.0000253

Cited by 24 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Job prospects and changing the world had positive influence across both genders. Such relationships with career outcomes has been documented elsewhere [10,18]. Interestingly, while the influence of the media on engineering has been a place of concern in the literature [11,19], little impact was shown for both genders.…”

Section: A What Made You Choose An Engineering Degree?mentioning

confidence: 67%

Engineering Students at Day Zero: Selection and Concerns by Gender

Nikolic

Suesse

Goldfinch

2018

2018 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE)

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The importance of attracting students to STEM disciplines such as engineering is well understood. Many developed countries are trying to grow numbers in the field by attracting a greater proportion of females than currently exists. This study explores student engineering selection decisions and initial concerns by gender prior to official commencement of classes within common first year engineering.

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Section: A What Made You Choose An Engineering Degree?mentioning

confidence: 67%

Engineering Students at Day Zero: Selection and Concerns by Gender

Nikolic

Suesse

Goldfinch

2018

2018 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE)

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“…While university students consider sustainability and sustainable development generally as an important and positive concept, they also seem to have incomplete knowledge of the matter [10,11]. Engineering students often connect sustainable development with environmental issues and do not link social aspects as strongly to sustainability [11][12][13][14]. As a result, university teachers have a crucial role in integrating sustainability-related knowledge and skills within courses and curricula.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Building a More Sustainable Society? A Case Study on the Role of Sustainable Development in the Education and Early Career of Water and Environmental Engineers

2018

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Engineering education is critical for sustainability, given the key role that engineers have in shaping the development of our society. Yet, engineering studies have traditionally not been driven by sustainability-related knowledge and skills, but focused more on general computational skills and technical problem-solving. This has also been the case in our case study, which focuses on recent water and environmental engineering graduates in Finland. We studied the role that sustainable development has had in their education and early career through an extensive questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The analysis was done in two ways: indirectly by comparing how well the key working life knowledge and skills recognized by the respondents correspond with sustainability-related skills, and directly by studying the graduates’ views towards the sustainable development and their possibilities to advance it in their work. The results show that although sustainability was not at the core of respondents’ studies, their key competencies correspond well with sustainability-related working life skills. The respondents also see that sustainable development has a central role in water and environmental engineering, although it is typically more visible at a strategic rather than a practical level. However, the results also indicate that several early-career engineers have deficient knowledge of sustainable development, and are therefore lacking the ability to fully connect the principles of sustainable development into their own expertise. Overall, the findings suggest that water and environmental engineers with their wide set of competencies have the potential to take on a larger role in building a more sustainable society. To ensure this, engineering education should emphasize the connection between the field and sustainable development and clearly link engineers’ core competencies with the skills required to promote sustainability.

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“…So, a national survey for senior engineering students was modeled on the SaGE survey, the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication [7], [26], and the climate literacy survey from Clarkson University [27]. Additional questions were developed about engineering course content and standards [28], [29], sustainability [30]- [32], critical engineering agency [33], and career choice [34]- [36]. The survey includes 40 anchored, numerical, multiple choice, and categorical questions divided into six sections: (1) career goals, (2) college experiences, (3) about you, (4) climate science, (5) people and the planet, and (6) demographic information.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring Misconceptions About Climate Change Between Freshmen and Senior Civil Engineering Students

Shealy

2018 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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Anthropogenic climate change is irreversibly affecting the planet and society. Civil engineers hold responsibility to design and construct built-environment spaces that decrease climate changing emissions. The purpose of the research presented in this paper is to assess how undergraduate civil engineering programs contribute to this goal. A cross-sectional comparison between data from a prior national survey of freshmen engineering students interested in civil engineering and pilot data from a national survey to senior undergraduate engineering students was used to assess students' belief in climate change, their understanding of climate science, and desire to address climate change in their careers. The results indicate that senior undergraduate civil engineering students are more likely to believe that climate change is caused by humans (67%) compared to freshmen engineering students (47%). These seniors are also more likely (73%) to agree that action should be taken to address climate change. Yet, only 37 percent hope to personally address climate change in their careers. Senior civil engineering students are more likely than their peers in other engineering disciplines to take classes that include sustainability and climate change as topics (predominately in engineering electives), yet their knowledge of climate science is no better, and in several instances, worse than their engineering peers. For example, civil engineering students are more likely to agree with the statement, "I believe a cause of global climate change is nuclear power generation," and "I believe a cause of global climate change is the ozone hole in the upper atmosphere." Undergraduate education is likely contributing to increased belief and recognition to address climate change but an educational gap still persists in understanding. Future research should explore why misconceptions still exist even when climate change is taught in engineering courses and how particular concepts are explained and how student experiences shape understanding and interest.

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Career Outcome Expectations Related to Sustainability among Students Intending to Major in Civil Engineering

Cited by 24 publications

References 28 publications

Engineering Students at Day Zero: Selection and Concerns by Gender

Engineering Students at Day Zero: Selection and Concerns by Gender

Building a More Sustainable Society? A Case Study on the Role of Sustainable Development in the Education and Early Career of Water and Environmental Engineers

Measuring Misconceptions About Climate Change Between Freshmen and Senior Civil Engineering Students

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