STORIESSTories of Resilience and Inclusion of Engineering Students
STORIESThey haven’t actually been asked yet, but we’ve guessed that they might come up. Check here if you have questions and contact us if you don’t see them answered.
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Thank you to all plugin authors and artists for making your work available!
Stories are part of what makes us human! Stories can be a powerful way of communicating information. We think it’s important for engineering students, faculty, and professional engineers to share their stories to open up lines of communication.
Starting in Fall 2018, we interviewed 25 engineering students every semester and talked with them about their time in college. These students came from engineering programs all over the United States, from small liberal arts schools to big public universities. They also reflect 11 different engineering majors. However, as we build up this website, you’ll also find stories from all kinds of people who have contributed their experiences. You can contribute your story here.
We used Zoom calls to talk with 25 engineering students. We audio recorded our interviews and turned that audio data into written transcripts. We then used a process called “narrative smoothing” to reorder and clarify the transcripts. “Smoothing” is useful because people might tell things out of order or take some time to pull their thoughts together. We were very careful in this process to stay true to the words of the students.
Stories are useful because we can learn from them and can see ourselves in them. We recommend that you use the system of tags on the “Story Collection” homepage to find topics that you’re most interested in. Read through some stories and see how people like you made it through similar circumstances.
Faculty and instructors may also be interested in these stories to better understand the experience of students they are teaching and mentoring. We encourage faculty to check out our “For Faculty” page for some specific resources developed from our research.
Terms like “generalizable” come from ways of doing research that deal with lots of people and use quantitative data (for example, surveys that ask you to rate something from 1-7). The type of research we did doesn’t try to be generalizable. Instead, we try to be “transferable.”
Transferability means that we believe these findings might be applicable in similar situations, but we don’t try to quantify it. Instead, we encourage you to read through the stories and think about how your own experiences are similar or different.
We are always building our story repository! Check out the “Share Your Story” page, which has instructions and recommendations.
Curious about something we didn’t discuss here? Send us an email through the contact page and let us know!