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，但研究和资源集中在研究生教育历来侧重于准备未来的教师在学术界。该项目将通过关注工程硕士和博士生的非学术职业道路来满足加强工程师专业准备的要求。在这些非学术领域，高级工程学位对于个人职业轨迹以及在全球创新格局中的持续竞争力越来越重要。 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，使他们能够成功，迅速地在新的岗位上做出贡献。此外，工业界和政府都强调需要扩大对工程的参与，本项目将特别关注少数民族研究生如何在其职业道路上获得最佳支持的经验。该项目与工程师专业培训资助计划的目标密切相关，“为21世纪创造和支持创新和包容性的工程专业”。在其核心，该项目的目的是了解和确定如何提高工程师在研究生水平的专业形成，使他们能够最好地准备成功过渡到非学术劳动力。该项目将寻求了解：1）工程研究生课程的最近校友如何描述接触，准备和决定非学术职业，以及2）工程教师，工作人员和管理人员支持学生为这些职业做好准备。该项目将使用生态理论框架来组织数据收集和分析，这将使调查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分析，以便从不同的角度了解问题。首先，调查人员将使用博士生调查（SED）和博士生调查（SDR）对工程领域的非学术职业途径进行全国范围的定量分析，并向所有拥有工程研究生的机构提供基准数据。其次，调查人员有目的地抽样调查了四个机构，这些机构是多个工程研究中心（ERC）和/或产学研合作研究中心（IUCRC）的活跃成员，因此，它们能够很好地支持学院以外的工程研究生的职业道路。该项目将调查校友，中心主任和教师的经验，以了解这些机构和计划如何为非学术职业的工程毕业生做好准备，并深入了解毕业生如何做出职业决定。专注于中心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，这些合作理论上将学生置于超越学术界边界的研究空间中。为少数民族服务的机构被有意纳入样本，以了解如何特别是少数民族研究生可以得到最好的支持。先前对博士生的研究表明，尽管行业和政府多次呼吁扩大参与，但女性和来自代表性不足的少数群体的学生仍然比他们的白色男性同龄人更有可能在毕业时没有工作机会。第三，根据初步样本的调查结果，该项目将产生和管理问卷的毕业生，董事和教师在44个额外的机构利用ERC/IUCRC网络作为抽样机制。这一步骤将增加样本的代表性，并使不同机构，学科和ERC/IUCRCs的差异探索。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

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.