Development of a Gender and Leadership Course

Beth Holloway, Director, Women in Engineering Program, Purdue University

Beth will present her experiences in the development of a proposed ENE graduate course on Gender and Leadership. She will share her vision of the framework for the class and a draft of a course syllabus. Feedback is appreciated.

Beth Holloway is the Director of the Purdue Women in Engineering Program (WIEP), and a new Engineering Education graduate student. Beth received both B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University. She is the advisor to the award winning Purdue Student Section of the Society of Women Engnieers, and is a past president of WEPAN (Women in Engineering ProActive Network), a national organization of about 600 members dedicated to being a catalyst, advocate, and leading resource for institutional and national change that enable the success of all women in engineering.

Mentoring Programs & A Comparison of Engineering Students’ Reflections on their First Year Experience

Kerry Meyers, ENE

The College of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame introduced a mentoring program in the fall of 2005. Eight upper division engineering students were selected to ease the transition of first-year engineering students by inviting them to special events enabling interaction with other engineering students. An underlying goal was to help first-year students develop a network of friends and resources that would help them to succeed in the engineering curriculum so that each student’s decision to stay in or leave engineering is self-determined. The original vision for the program involved mentors meeting with first-year students in small groups on a regular basis (weekly or bi-weekly), but it quickly evolved into a series of optional academic and social events open to the entire class of first-year students.

A survey to assess retrospective student perceptions of their first year of engineering and their comfort level with a variety of factors was administered twice to a cross-sectional population of sophomore- and junior-level students. The first administration took place in January 2006 as baseline data prior to the mentoring program, and the second administration took place in January 2008 after two years of students had experienced the program. While the generalizability of the results are limited by the cross-sectional nature of the study, findings confirm: (1) gender differences in comfort with the decision to stay in engineering, (2) students are more comfortable approaching fellow students than faculty for advice in many situations, and (3) that adjustment to engineering is affected positively by participation in the mentoring program. Observed gender differences in the effect of the mentoring program on adjustment to engineering can be accounted for by including confidence in engineering in the model. While these findings should be useful in defining strategies for interventions to support first-year engineering students, the mentoring program studied did not affect student satisfaction or confidence. This is consistent with other studies that indicate that formal mentoring does not predictably yield the same results as informal mentoring is known to achieve.

Kerry Meyers is a PhD Candidate in the department of Engineering Education working with Matt Ohland. She also works as a faculty member in the first-year engineering program at the University of Notre Dame.