Impact of innovative workshops to inspire students to pursue a STEM career

Currently, at the School of Engineering and Sciences at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Monterrey Campus, around 30% of new students do not select an academic program upon entering the university. The new educational model at our university allows first-year students to choose, in the admission process, an area of study and later on (between semester 2 and 3) select an academic program. This characteristic in our educational model allowed us to see that there is a large number of students in their last semester of high school who do not know which academic program to choose. For this reason, 4 workshops were created, a workshop for each of the 4 areas of Engineering and Science (Innovation and Transformation, Computer Science and Information Technologies, Bioengineering and Chemical Processes, Applied Sciences) to offer our potential students the opportunity to carry out activities that provide them with information and experiences that help them make a better career decision. Since Tecnologico de Monterrey also has high schools, we applied these pilot workshops to 120 students in the last semester of one of the Tec de Monterrey high schools. The surveys applied at the end of these workshops showed that these activities contributed to improve the academic knowledge of the STEM areas in the students. Moreover, the workshops were rated almost perfectly by the students, in the areas of workshop content, materials used and teacher performance. Finally, students confirmed that these activities contributed to their career decision making process.