Research: Collaborative Research: Non-Academic Career Paths of Master’s and PhD Engineers

大多数工程硕士和博士毕业生将进入工业和政府等部门的职业生涯，然而，研究生教育的研究和资源历来都集中在为学术界的未来教员做准备。该项目将通过关注工程硕士和博士研究生的非学术职业道路来满足加强工程师专业准备的要求。高等工程学位在这些非学术领域变得越来越重要，无论是对个人的职业发展轨迹，还是在全球创新格局中保持竞争力。该项目将确定研究生课程如何更好地支持学生从事这些职业，使他们能够在新的岗位上成功、快速地做出贡献。此外，行业和政府都强调了扩大工程参与的必要性，该项目将特别关注如何在少数民族研究生的职业道路上得到最好的支持。该项目与工程师专业形成资助计划的目标密切相关，该计划旨在“为21世纪创造和支持创新和包容的工程专业”。该项目的核心目的是了解和确定提高研究生水平工程师专业形成的方法，以便他们为成功过渡到非学术劳动力做好最好的准备。本项目将试图了解：1)工程研究生项目的近期校友如何描述他们接触、准备和决定非学术职业，以及2)工程教师、员工和管理人员如何支持学生为此类职业做好准备。该项目将使用生态理论框架来组织数据收集和分析，这将使研究人员能够在更广泛的系统和环境因素中考虑影响工程毕业生追求非学术职业的个人决定。该项目将对多个数据源进行三角测量，从不同的角度来理解这个问题。首先，研究人员将使用获得博士学位调查（SED）和博士学位获得者调查（SDR）对工程领域的非学术职业道路进行全国范围的定量分析，并为所有拥有工程研究生的机构提供基准数据。其次，调查人员有目的地选取了四个机构，这些机构是多个工程研究中心（ERCs）和/或产学研合作研究中心（iucrc）的活跃成员，因此，它们很好地为工程研究生在学院之外的职业道路提供了支持。该项目将调查校友、中心主任和教师的经验，以了解这些机构和项目如何为工程专业毕业生的非学术职业做好准备，并深入了解毕业生如何做出职业决定。以中心为重点的抽样策略是一种独特的策略，它有目的地从nsf支持的合作中收集新数据，从理论上讲，这些合作将学生置于超越学术界限的研究空间中。为少数族裔服务的机构被有意纳入样本，以了解如何最好地支持少数族裔研究生。之前对博士生的研究表明，尽管业界和政府多次呼吁扩大博士生的参与，但女性和来自未被充分代表的少数群体的学生在毕业时仍比白人男性同龄人更有可能找不到工作。第三，基于最初样本的调查结果，该项目将利用ERC/IUCRC网络作为抽样机制，为另外44个机构的毕业生、主任和教师制作和管理问卷。这一步骤将增加样本的代表性，并能够探索机构、学科和ERC/ iucrc之间的差异。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Most engineering Master’s and PhD graduates will enter careers in sectors such as industry and government, yet research and resources focused on graduate education have historically focused on preparation of future faculty members in academia. This project will meet the call for enhancing the professional preparation of engineers by focusing on non-academic career pathways of both Master’s and PhD students in engineering. Advanced engineering degrees are becoming increasingly important in these non-academic sectors for both individual career trajectories as well as for continued competitiveness within the global innovation landscape. The project will identify how graduate programs can better support students for these careers so that they may successfully and quickly make contributions in their new positions. Additionally, both industry and government have emphasized the need to broaden participation in engineering, and this project will pay particular attention to the experiences of how minoritized graduate students may be best supported on their career paths. The project aligns closely with the goals of the Professional Formation of Engineers funding program “to create and support an innovative and inclusive engineering profession for the 21st century.” At its core, the project aims to understand and identify ways to enhance the professional formation of engineers at the graduate level so that they are best prepared to transition successfully into the non-academic workforce.This project will seek to understand: 1) how recent alumni of engineering graduate programs describe being exposed to, preparing for, and making decisions about non-academic careers, and 2) how engineering faculty, staff, and administrators support students to prepare for such careers. The project will use an ecological theoretical framework to organize data collection and analyses, which will allow the investigators to consider individual decisions within broader systems and environmental factors that influence engineering graduates’ pursuit of non-academic careers. The project will triangulate multiple data sources to understand the issue from different perspectives. First, the investigators will conduct national-scale quantitative analyses of non-academic career pathways in engineering using the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) and Survey of Doctoral Recipients (SDR) and provide benchmarking data to all institutions with engineering graduate students. Second, the investigators have purposively sampled four institutions that are active members of multiple engineering research centers (ERCs) and/or Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRCs) and, as such, are well positioned to support career pathways for engineering graduate students beyond the academy. This project will investigate experiences of alumni, center directors, and faculty to understand how these institutions and programs prepare engineering graduates for non-academic careers and to gain insight on how graduates make career decisions. The sampling strategy to focus on Centers is a unique strategy that purposefully collects new data from NSF-supported collaborations that theoretically put students in research spaces that transcend the boundaries of academia. Minority-serving institutions are intentionally included in the sample to understand how minoritized graduate students in particular can be best supported. Prior work on PhD students has shown that despite many calls from industry and the government that broadening participation is needed, women and students from underrepresented minority groups still are more likely than their white, male peers to have no job offers at the time of graduation. Third, based on findings from that initial sample, the project will generate and administer questionnaires to graduates, directors, and faculty at 44 additional institutions leveraging the ERC/IUCRC network as a sampling mechanism. This step will increase the representativeness of the sample and enable exploration of differences across institutions, disciplines, and ERC/IUCRCs.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.