Research: Engineering for Social Justice: Factors shaping the career aspirations and mindsets of humanitarian engineers

人道主义工程(HE)计划旨在培训工程师，以改善服务不足和边缘化社区的健康、繁荣和福利。他越来越受到学生的欢迎，有可能招收关注社会的学生和来自少数族裔群体的学生进入工程学；然而，关于这些学生被录取后职业道路的研究有限。此外，非殖民化和社会正义改革正在改变高等教育部门，有必要了解包括自我效能、结果期望、职业兴趣、与社会正义改革的一致性以及在该部门的留任等职业前景是如何变化的。该项目将确定职业抱负和期望的特点，并确定影响职业道路和社会正义价值体系发展的因素和经验。与高等教育从业者的回应进行比较将有助于确定学生的期望和目标如何与从业者的实际情况保持一致或不一致。因此，这个项目将描述职业道路，帮助学生了解毕业后的潜在职业和该领域所需的技能。此外，该项目将为高等教育教育项目和该部门创建基于研究的建议，确定使工程有助于社会正义的学习经验，并反思高等教育部门可以采取的行动，以留住和支持具有社会意识的工程实践者。该项目将纵向研究美国八个高等教育研究生项目的学生。该项目将关注职业观，包括职业抱负、期望和自我效能感。与此同时，我们认识到社会正义运动正在如何影响全球工程学领域，为具有社会意识的工程学学生开辟了新的考虑和途径，这些学生可能会也可能不会与该领域当前的机会保持一致。为了捕捉这些实时变化并确定学生具有社会意识的职业目标如何与现场实际相一致，我们将使用混合方法、纵向数据来记录这些职业观如何随着时间的推移而变化，以及影响这些职业观和变化的因素。纵向数据将包括每个学期对学生进行的访谈、调查问卷，以及研究团队维护的特定于高等教育的在线社区中的定期讨论。对高等教育从业者进行的采访分析，并与学生的反应进行比较，将揭示出职业前景和现实之间的(错位)对齐。该项目不仅将描述职业发展轨迹，还将推进工程价值系统发展的理论。此外，通过在这个社会正义改革时期收集易腐烂的数据，该项目还将建立关于社会正义运动和心态如何有助于工科学生的观点和心态的理论。一个由高等教育研究生项目的教师组成的专家顾问委员会将帮助进一步传播成果，以便在项目中吸收。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。

Humanitarian Engineering (HE) programs aim to train engineers to improve the health, prosperity, and welfare of underserved and marginalized communities. HE is increasingly desired by students and has the potential to recruit socially attentive students and students from underrepresented minority groups to engineering; however, there is limited research on the career paths of these students after admission. Further, decolonization and social justice reforms are changing the HE sector, and there is a need to understand how career outlooks, including self-efficacy, outcome expectations, career interests, alignment with social justice reform, and retention in the sector, are changing. This project will characterize career aspirations and expectations and identify factors and experiences that influence career pathways and the development of social justice value systems. Comparisons with responses from HE practitioners will help determine how student expectations and goals align or misalign with practitioner reality. As a result, this project will characterize career pathways to help inform students of potential careers post-graduation and needed skill sets in the sector. Additionally, the project will create research-based recommendations for HE educational programs and the sector, identify learning experiences that enable engineering for social justice, and provide reflection for actions that can be taken in the HE sector to retain and support socially-minded engineering practitioners.This project will longitudinally study students from eight HE graduate programs in the United States. The project will focus on career outlooks, including career aspirations, expectations, and self-efficacy. At the same time, we recognize how social justice movements are impacting the field of global engineering, opening up new considerations and pathways for socially minded engineering students that may or may not be aligned with current opportunities in the field. In order to capture these real-time changes and to determine how students’ socially minded career goals align with field realities, we will use mixed-method, longitudinal data to record how these career outlooks change over time and the factors that influence these career outlooks and changes. Longitudinal data will include interviews conducted with students each term, survey questionnaires, and regular discussions in a HE-specific online community maintained by the research team. Analysis of interviews conducted with HE practitioners and compared with student responses will reveal (mis)alignments between career outlooks and realities. The project will not only characterize career trajectories but also advance theory of engineering value system development. Further, by collecting perishable data in this time of social justice reform, the project will also build theory on how social justice movements and mindsets contribute to engineering student outlooks and mindsets. An expert advisory board of faculty from HE graduate programs will help further disseminate results for uptake in programs.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.