Share Your Story

Are you a current or past engineering student and interested in sharing your story? If so, we’d like to ask you to complete our 15-minute survey, Actualizing Latent Diversity: Online Qualitative Data Collection [IRB-2022-84]. This website showcases research from long-term interviews with several students, but the more student voices we can incorporate, the better!

If you are interested, please read on below for more information about your rights as a research participant and for instructions on how to participate.

Audio Stories

You will have the option to respond to questions through audio, if you prefer. We will ask you to record your response using a free website and then upload it through a secure, anonymous form. We will never share your audio — when your story appears on our website, it will be transcribed entirely into text.

Text Stories

If you’re more comfortable typing or don’t have a way to record at the moment, you can also respond in writing! We’ve provided both options since we’re interested in hearing your thoughts, and sometimes it’s easier to talk things through than type them. Both options are completely acceptable, and your information will be kept secure either way!

About Research Participation

The purpose of this study is to understand the diversity of attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, and career expectations of engineering students. We are seeking to improve the culture of engineering to make it more attractive to students and to help students feel that they belong in engineering. We plan on surveying up to 200 visitors to our website over the next year, with the possibility to extend the survey in the future.

This study has been reviewed and approved by the Purdue University IRB (IRB-2022-84; for more information on what an IRB is and how it works, check here). As part of the study procedure, we will ask you to review a form that describes your rights as a study participant and then indicate your willingness to participate. You can preview this consent form below.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Audio Stories

Below is a short YouTube video that shows the audio recording and uploading process. It will work best on a laptop or desktop computer with a microphone.

  1. Click the ‘Get Started with the Survey’ link below.
  2. Read the introduction and consent form carefully. These forms list your rights as a study participant and provide more information about what we’ll be asking you.
  3. Indicate that you are over 18 and wish to participate, and click proceed.
  4. Once you have read the current question, head over to Vocaroo.  Note that you aren’t required to use this site — if you have another way to record MP3s (or similarly encoded files, as there is a size limit on the file upload) you can use that. If you’re not sure what any of that means, we recommend sticking with Vocaroo.
  5. Click the red microphone button on Vocaroo to record your response. When you’re done, click the red stop button. (You can pause the recording using the pause button if needed.)
  6. Once you hit stop, a ‘Save & Share’ button will appear. Clicking this will present a number of ways to share your audio. For this survey, we’ll need you to click ‘Download’ and save the audio file to your computer.
  7. Once you’ve downloaded the file, you can hit ‘Delete’ and it will be erased from the Vocaroo servers.
  8. Within the survey, select the ‘upload’ option proceed to the next question once the upload is complete.
  9. Rinse and repeat!

If you run into any issues, please reach out to us at godwina@purdue.edu or hlperkin@purdue.edu and let us know what’s going on.

Thank you for participating, and we’re looking forward to hearing your story!

Text Stories

Responding to the survey using text responses is much easier than the audio alternative. All you need is a computer and a keyboard!

  1. Click the ‘Get Started with the Survey’ link below.
  2. Read the introduction and consent form carefully. These forms list your rights as a study participant and provide more information about what we’ll be asking you.
  3. Indicate that you are over 18 and wish to participate, and click proceed.
  4. Once you have read the current question, type in your response. You can ignore the file upload section if you aren’t using the audio.
  5. Proceed to the next question once your response is complete.
  6. Rinse and repeat!

If you run into any issues, please reach out to us at godwina@purdue.edu or hlperkin@purdue.edu and let us know what’s going on.

Thank you for participating, and we’re looking forward to hearing your story!

Ready to Participate?

The survey should take about 15 minutes to repeat. You won’t have the option to pause and return later, so it’s best to make sure you have enough time set aside. As always, if you have questions, reach out to us at godwina@purdue.edu or hlperkin@purdue.edu and we’ll be happy to help!

Get Started with the Survey!