Cultural Intelligence and Experiences in International Engineering Programs

Given increasingly globalized economic trends and the global nature of many of the most pressing humanitarian problems the world faces, this full paper addresses engineers' needs to be prepared with the skills and competencies necessary to work with diverse clients and peers and on projects that span international borders. To foster such skills, engineering schools across the country are offering more international engineering programs at the undergraduate level. These programs, charged with the important task of preparing future engineers for globalized work, need to be appropriately evaluated to determine their effectiveness in promoting intercultural outcomes. Similarly, it is important to understand which aspects of these programs are most essential to helping foster intercultural outcomes in students. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the following research questions: 1) Is there a significant change in students' cultural intelligence before and after they participate in international engineering programs, and 2) What relationships exist between students' cultural intelligence and their experiences in intercultural educational programs, when controlling for student characteristics and program variables? The answers to both questions are of great importance to the field of engineering, as they provide evidence to inform decisions around how to create, modify, and structure international programs in engineering. We found that participants' cultural intelligence as measured by the Cultural Intelligence Survey [13] significantly grew from pretest to posttest on the overall cultural intelligence (CQ) measure, as well as all four cultural intelligence dimensions. We also found that students' experiences abroad- specifically the frequency with which they built relationships and had meaningful conversations about culture with locals-was positively related to an increase in CQ score from pretest to posttest. Together, these findings suggest that not only are international programs in engineering successful in promoting intercultural outcomes, but also that students' frequency of interaction with local people is an important component of successful international programs. These findings have the potential to shape a range of international programs to better meet the needs of both future engineers and the clients, employers, and members of society that stand to benefit from their readiness to tackle global engineering challenges.