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

研究：合作研究：硕士和博士工程师的非学术职业道路

• 批准号: 2114210
• 负责人: Maura Borrego
• 金额: $ 20.79万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-09-01 至 2024-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2114210&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Research; Collaborative; Non; Academic; Career

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.

大多数工程学硕士和博士毕业生将进入行业和政府等部门的职业生涯，然而，专注于研究生教育的研究和资源历来侧重于为学术界未来的教师做准备。该项目将通过关注工程学硕士和博士生的非学术职业道路，满足加强工程师专业准备的呼吁。高级工程学位在这些非学术领域正变得越来越重要，无论是对个人的职业发展轨迹，还是对全球创新格局中的持续竞争力都是如此。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，以便他们能够在新的职位上成功而快速地做出贡献。此外，工业界和政府都强调有必要扩大对工程学的参与，本项目将特别关注小规模研究生如何在其职业道路上获得最佳支持的经验。该项目与工程师职业形成资助计划的目标密切一致，该计划旨在“为21世纪创造和支持一个创新和包容的工程职业”。该项目的核心是了解和确定如何加强研究生阶段工程师的职业形成，以便他们为成功过渡到非学术工作队伍做好最好的准备。本项目将寻求了解：1)最近毕业于工程学研究生课程的校友如何描述接触非学术职业、为非学术职业做准备并做出决定的情况，以及2)工程学教师、教职员工和管理人员如何支持学生为此类职业做准备。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内考虑个人决策，以及影响工程学毕业生追求非学术职业的环境因素。该项目将对多个数据源进行三角测量，以从不同的角度了解这一问题。首先，调查人员将利用博士生调查(SED)和博士生调查(SDR)对工程学领域的非学术职业生涯进行全国性的量化分析，并向所有拥有工程学研究生的机构提供基准数据。其次，调查人员有目的地抽样了四所机构，这些机构是多个工程研究中心(ERCs)和/或产学合作研究中心(IUCRC)的活跃成员，因此能够很好地支持工程学研究生在学院以外的职业道路。该项目将调查校友、中心主任和教职员工的经历，以了解这些机构和项目如何为工程学毕业生的非学术职业生涯做准备，并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界限的研究空间。为少数群体服务的机构被有意纳入样本，以了解如何才能最好地支持小规模的研究生。之前对博士生的研究表明，尽管行业和政府多次呼吁需要扩大参与，但来自代表性不足的少数群体的女性和学生在毕业时仍然比他们的白人男性同龄人更有可能没有工作机会。第三，根据最初抽样的结果，该项目将利用ERC/IUCRC网络作为抽样机制，向另外44个机构的毕业生、主任和教职员工编制和管理问卷。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。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

项目成果

Engineering Graduate Education in the United States

美国的工程研究生教育

• 发表时间: 2023
• 期刊: International Handbook of Engineering Education Research
• 作者: Fleming, Gabriella Coloyan;Borrego, Maura;Knight, David
• 通讯作者: Knight, David

The fallacy of “there are no candidates”: Institutional pathways of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino doctorate earners

“没有候选人”的谬论：黑人/非裔美国人和西班牙裔/拉丁裔博士获得者的制度路径

• DOI: 10.1002/jee.20491
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Journal of Engineering Education
• 影响因子: 3.4
• 作者: Fleming, Gabriella Coloyan;Patrick, Anita D.;Grote, Dustin;Denton, Maya;Knight, David;Lee, Walter;Borrego, Maura;Murzi, Homero
• 通讯作者: Murzi, Homero