Paige Brown

Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace

In this independent study, I had the opportunity to take courses and read literature about diversity and inclusion in the workplace. In this talk, I will review what I learned including how to improve engagement, how to counteract unconscious bias, and how to foster an inclusive climate at work. I will also discuss how these lessons apply to engineering education and my research involving Black women in engineering industry.

Bio

Paige Brown is an Engineering Education Ph.D. candidate and George Washington Carver Fellow at Purdue University. Her research includes examining the undergraduate experiences of Black women engineers, engineering culture, and diversity and inclusion in engineering. 

Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, Paige was employed in engineering industry. Fueled by her experiences in industry, Paige wrote Conqueror: A Black Woman’s Guide to Conquering Challenges in the Workplace, where she recounts challenges she experienced in the workplace and provides strategies to help other women overcome those challenges.

Outside of her educational and professional career, Paige enjoys working with students and has developed and implemented K-12 STEM outreach programs and informal learning experiences.  She chartered a National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) Jr. chapter and was awarded the NSBE Golden Torch Award for Pre-College Initiative Director of the Year and the Black Engineer of the Year Community Service Award for her work. 

Paige has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina A&T State University, a M.Ed. in Teaching and Learning from Liberty University, and a certificate in Diversity and Inclusion from Cornell University.

Nat Gentry

Applied Survey Analysis

The last year has brought about many challenges to undergraduate students. As part of a collaboration with the Purdue Office of the Provost, our research team administered a modified assessment of students’ sense of belonging, satisfaction with Purdue, and their academic social capital.  The purpose of this 590 was for me to learn applied survey validation techniques. Specifically, my goal was to evaluate the modified sense of belonging and satisfaction scales as part of a larger validation study. The research question posed is, To what extent do items of the modified SOB and satisfaction function as theoretically conceptualized? In pursuit of this research question, I learned about how messy undergraduate survey data is, how to preprocess data, and the types of decisions to make in exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. In my talk, I will discuss how my semester plans went, what I learned, and next steps forward.

Bio

A. Nat Gentry is a first-year graduate student at Purdue University in the Engineering Education Ph.D. program. They completed their undergraduate degree in Materials Engineering from Purdue in May 2020. Nat’s research interests include assessing student supports in cooperative education programs provided through mentoring relationships.

Athena Lin

Developing an Undergraduate Engineering Ethics Course

This semester, I conducted an independent study with Dr. Justin Hess to develop an undergraduate engineering ethics course in the Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Engineering program. We adopted a practice-oriented approach to teaching ethics with the goal of preparing students to recognize ethical situations and formulate reasoned responses to difficult situations they may encounter in their careers. In this presentation, I will share our instructional design process (informed by the backwards design model), including how we developed our learning outcomes and how these outcomes informed other aspects of the course. We welcome discussion with our audience about how we can improve our course design to best serve the ethics education of engineering students at Purdue.

Bio

Athena Lin is a second-year graduate student in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University and an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. She received her B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to starting her graduate studies, she spent two years working at Texas Instruments as a semiconductor packaging engineer.