CAREER: Connecting with the Future: Supporting Identity and Career Development in Post-secondary Science and Engineering

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Some of the most important steps students take toward a Science and Engineering (S & E) career are choosing the right coursework, experiences, and mentors to help them accomplish their career goals. To help students choose career paths in S & E, and persist in the face of inevitable difficulties and disappointments, we need to understand how they conceptualize their futures (Packard & Nguyen, 2003). The concepts and processes involved in this conceptualization make up a person's future time perspective (FTP). The more accurate, complete, and viable a person's FTP, the more likely they are to succeed, both in the present and in the future. By better understanding how students think about their futures in S & E, we can better support and guide them, increasing the number of students who choose and succeed in S & E careers. This project will develop and validate a model of FTP and apply it to evaluating interventions intended to help students choose and persist in engineering career paths. It has three phases. In Phase I, a model of students' FTP, and, in particular, their future as engineers will be developed and tested. In Phase II, the model will be extended, tracking students from freshman year to senior year in order to explore the relationship between students' FTP, their academic performance, and their motivation to pursue careers in engineering. Because of the longitudinal nature of the project, students who move from engineering into other scientific fields, into science education, or into a non-science-oriented career will also be tracked. Phase III will begin the process of using what has bee learned in the previous phases about the motivational profiles of successful engineering students to evaluate programs already in place to recruit students into engineering. This research will be conducted at Arizona State University (ASU), a university notable for the diversity of its student body, not only in ethnicity and language, but also socioeconomic status and family educational experience. The diversity of ASU's student body and the large sample that will be tracked will support the extension of findings from this project to other universities. The PI will work with a consortium of universities in the Southwestern United States for dissemination of research results and consultations about interventions at other universities.