Effectively Transforming Students through First Year Engineering Student Experiences

The premise of this Research to Practice Work in Progress Paper is that promoting STEM student attraction, transfer, retention, and academic success is critical for the future workforce and the economy of our Nation especially for the underrepresented populations in the STEM workforce. At many higher education institutions, including minority serving institutions, there is a need to address primary skill deficiencies in engineering students. These deficiencies in skills can be technical and non-technical (i.e., personal, soft). Most of the current efforts from faculty and existing educational programs, focus on developing technical skills, where the faculty makes an extraordinary effort to help students learn and understand the courses' contents. For this reason, the focus of this paper is on non-technical skills for student academic success. The objectives of this paper are (1) identify the potential skills necessary to thrive in an engineering program; this includes a literature review on skills, (2) define educational experiences as interventions to develop these skills in the students, and (3); explore the metrics associated with the selected skills; this is necessary to measure improvements. These skills will enable the self-transformation of students to be more effective and successful. It is expected that a critical mass of these students will promote and nourish communities of learners. These successful students will continue their transformation into professional innovators to tackle critical needs in their respective regions. Educational experiences on innovation will help in the development of specific skills to initiate a transformation in the student that can allow them to thrive in an engineering program. This transformation of self, community (as a student), and region (as a professional) can become a model that can be transferred to other institutions interested in preparing resilient learners.