New Engineers' First Three Months: A Study of the Transition from Capstone Design Courses to Workplaces

Abstract

Boulder. She is also the Design Center Colorado Director of Undergraduate Programs and a Senior Instructor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She received B.S. and M.S degrees in mechanical engineering from The Ohio State University and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder. Kotys-Schwartz has focused her research in engineering student learning, retention, and student identity development within the context of engineering design. She is currently investigating the impact of cultural norms in an engineering classroom context, performing comparative studies between engineering education and professional design practices, examining holistic approaches to student retention, and exploring informal learning in engineering education.

How do undergraduate engineering students conceptualize product design? An analysis of two third‐year design courses

“…Many industry professionals have reported a skills gap between recent graduates and the workforce requirements, resulting in difficult transitions into the workforce (May & Strong, 2006). Some of the highlighted shortcomings of recent engineering graduates include market context understanding, communication, and independent learning (Gewirtz et al, 2018). The skills gap seemingly stems from different levels of historical prioritization in engineering design education between universities and industry (Dym, 1999; Nicolai, 1998).…”

Development and Implementation of a Reflective Journaling Method for Qualitative Research

“…Finally, as noted above, the anticipatory interviews allowed the lead author to meet each participant in person and establish rapport in ways that seemed to prevent attrition. Again, further research is needed to investigate the role of researcher-participant rapport, but similar studies point to the importance of having the follow up emails sent by the same researcher conducting the initial interviews (Gewirtz et al, 2018;Paretti et al, 2017).…”

“…One potential concern is the extensibility of the approach here-that is, how many graduates could successfully be followed in this way. Author 2 has successfully employed the same approach in a larger study involving graduates from four institutions (Gewirtz et al, 2018) to explore new graduates' transition experiences more broadly. Following the approach described here, this larger study recruited and interviewed students prior to graduation; given the number of institutions and the common semester end times, we used teams of researchers, with one to three people conducting interviews at each institution.…”

“…While this approach leads to an incomplete data set, as noted, it did yield a relatively high retention rate, and during the first 12 weeks, on average participants responded to 9 of the 12 quantitative surveys and 9 of 12 reflective prompts. To better explore patterns in the data given this limitation, we aggregated responses by month rather than by week-an approach that proved successful and yielded key insights regarding the challenges participants experienced in their transition from school to work (Gewirtz et al, 2018).…”

Professional Expectations and Program Climate Affect the Professional Formation of Engineers

“…According to general criterion #5, "students are prepared to enter the practice of engineering through a curriculum that includes a culminating major design experience" [4]. Almost all engineering programs now have a senior design capstone course and upper level professional courses which prepare students to transition into the workforce [5][6][7]. Many programs also offer professional seminars into the course sequence [8] as well as cornerstone design courses which can improve integration into their disciplines and social integration with their peers [9].…”