Resumen de Are we preparing our students to become engineers of the future or the past?
Idalis Villanueva, Louis S. Nadelson
A critical part of students’ development and persistence as engineers is their acquisition of a professional identity. Priorresearch indicates that science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students tend to over calibrate their level ofprofessional identity. This suggests that their self-determined level of professional identities are likely inflated whencompared to the levels of identity that their communication would indicate—which may appreciably influence theirprofessional engagement and tenacity as an engineer as well as their perceptions of engineering as a profession. One areathat has not been explored is the underlying factors that influence these self-elevated perspectives bythe students. The studyexplores the individual, social, and systemic domains as well as historical foci of 275 undergraduate engineering students’perceptions of the engineering profession. Findings indicate that students’ self-proclaimed levels of professional identityare higher than the development levels they convey in their survey responses. We found that their perceptions tended to bealigned with their individual view of engineering, which were guided by the historical notion that an engineer is aMediatorof science, math, and technology, a perspective that is not aligned to current definitions of 21st century engineering. Ourexploratory study supports the importance of helping engineering students develop professional identities by attending totheir understanding of the work, norms, and expectations of professional engineers and the role of a 21st centuryengineering professional.
