Supporting Veteran Students Along Engineering Pathways: Faculty, Student, and Researcher Perspectives

Abstract

Brian Novoselich is an active duty Army Lieutenant Colonel currently serving as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at the United States Military Academy (West Point). He earned his Ph.D. in Engineering Education at Virginia Tech in 2016. He holds Master's and Bachelor's degrees in mechanical engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and West Point respectively. His research interests include capstone design teaching and assessment, undergraduate engineering student leadership development, and social network analysis. He is also a licensed professional engineer in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Mrs. Janice Leshay Hall, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University I am a doctoral student in Engineering Education at Virginia Tech. I am a proud military brat with a biomedical engineering background. My own experiences navigating the engineering curriculum as a first-generation college student as well as being a colleague to other military-connected students through my membership as a 2010 Tillman Miltary Scholar have sparked my passion for research on pathways to and through engineering with emphasis on the formation of engineering identity especially among veteran students.

Military Veteran Students’ Pathways in Engineering Education (Year 6)

“…During year six, we have continued with the dissemination of research results in a variety of venues for a range of audiences, including engineering educators in the US, engineering educators from across the world, student affairs administrators who work with veterans, the Student Veterans Association (SVA), and the general public [2,3]. In addition to this paper for the 2020 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference NSF Grantees Poster Session, this project has yielded three published journal articles [4,5,6] and seventeen published conference papers [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. We did a presentation at the 2019 Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity (CoNECD) conference in April 2019 [24], a poster [25] at a sociology meeting, two conference special sessions at engineering education conferences [26,27] and three workshops for student affairs professionals and engineering educators [28,29,30].…”

Board 94: Military Veteran Students’ Pathways in Engineering Education (Year 5)

“…In addition to this paper for the 2019 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference NSF Grantees Poster Session, this project has yielded two published journal articles [9,10] and thirteen published conference papers [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. We did a presentation at the 2019 CoNECD conference in April 2019 [24] and have two papers for the ASEE conference in June 2019 [25,26].…”

Board 89: Military Veteran Students’ Pathways in Engineering Education (Year 4)

“…To date, in addition to this paper for the ASEE 2018 NSF Grantees Poster Session, this project has yielded nine published conference papers, 6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 two conference presentations for conferences in Spring 2018, 15,16 one conference special session, 17 two conference workshop presentations, 18,19 and an informal session at the 2018 Student Veterans of America (SVA) national conference. We are especially pleased that one of our papers received the Best Paper Award in the Military and Veterans Division of the American Society of Engineering Education in 2017.…”