Future Ready Engineering Leaders

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This project will prepare female leaders for the engineering workforce. Graduate students will acquire the skills demanded by engineering employers, while developing their self-confidence to overcome obstacles. As universities are not naturally structured to marshal disparate resources scattered across departments to maximize support, this project will cross organizational boundaries and cut through silos to create a multi-divisional and multi-organizational ecosystem of support for students. The short term and long-term impact of the programmatic interventions and mentoring components on women’s engineering identity and efficacy, career decision making and persistence in engineering will be studied. The project is aligned to the NSF BPE Program as it focuses on enhancing the diversity and inclusion of underrepresented populations in engineering.The project will transform graduate education by marshaling resources from both academic and student affairs’ entities while engaging industry partners, and providing holistic support for students’ academic, social, and career success. Female graduate students in engineering will acquire the career competencies employers want through curricular and practical experiences monitored by peer and industry mentors, that will connect students’ accomplishments to the job market. Industry-endorsed micro-credentials will be awarded to recognize, and display knowledge, skills, and abilities acquired. The research plan will synthesize elements of psychosocial models of academic and social engagement and will investigate, through a longitudinal, repeated measures design, the underlying psychosocial mechanisms that promote (or undermine) academic and career development and engagement as well as social engagement among the participants. This project will create a powerful ecosystem and will demonstrate strong collaborations between different campus offices to leverage industry connections and knowledge to maximize support for graduate students.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.