Resumen de Entrepreneurial career choice and characteristics of engineering and business students
Qu Jin, Shannon K. Gilmartin, Helen L. Chen, Sara K. Johnson, Michelle B. Weiner, Richard M. Lerner, Sheri D. Sheppard
This paper measures the entrepreneurial intent and related characteristics of engineering undergraduates, as comparedwith business students. The purpose of this study is to describe and test the difference on entrepreneurial intent and relatedcharacteristics for engineering and business students with different career goals for both genders. Data were collectedthrough the Young Entrepreneurs Study (YES) survey, which included 518 engineering and 471 business undergraduatesfrom multiple institutions. Analysis of Variance with Tukey-Kramer tests and independent samples t-tests with Bonferronicorrections were conducted to test for differences across groups. The results showed that starters (participants who statedstarting an organization as their career goal) reported significantly higher scores than did joiners (participants who statedjoining anorganization as their careergoal) in severalentrepreneurship-related characteristics. Although business studentswere more likely to cite entrepreneurship as their career goal than were engineering students, engineering and businessstudents who had the same career goals showed similar characteristics that were related to entrepreneurial intent. Womenand men starters, regardless of discipline, have similar entrepreneurship-related characteristics; however, business menhave higher entrepreneurial intent than do engineering women. With similar entrepreneurship-related characteristicsamong engineering and business starters, entrepreneurial courses and programs for engineering and business starters couldbe structured similarly. Perhaps these courses could be multidisciplinary, serving both engineering and business starters,although engineering students in these types of courses should be encouraged to have more confidence in communicatingtheir ideas. Curricula might be designed such that some groups, such as engineering women, with less salient intentions,could easily access resources and tools to develop their ideas.
