First Year Students Developing a Systems Perspective in the Grand Challenge Scholars Program

This work investigates how participation in the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Grand Challenge Scholars Program (GCSP) influences first year engineering students' development of a systems perspective. Students in the NAE GCSP participate in curricular and extracurricular activities to gain research/project experience, an interdisciplinary perspective, an entrepreneurial mindset, multicultural awareness, and social consciousness. At Arizona State University, most GCSP students begin program participation in their first year, primarily through a GCSP specific course designed to help them to develop an interdisciplinary perspective. Each year, approximately 20-25 percent of the incoming GCSP freshmen get involved in the program before classes start, during a weeklong summer program. To evaluate how these GCSP activities influence students' development of systems perspective, qualitative research methods were used to analyze students' end of semester course reflections. Results of a thematic analysis of the data indicate that first year students participating in these activities experience a change in how they think about engineering, recognizing the complexity of problems facing society and the need to consider societal factors (e.g. policy, culture) when developing engineering solutions.