Polytechnic Students’ Aspirations, Interests, and Confidence with Engineering Technology Majors

This Research Work in Progress Paper examines the understanding of engineering technology (ET) majors and careers by incoming students. Data comes from the Aspirations, Interests, and Confidence survey, which has been administered to 169 students over a three-year period. Part 1 of the survey collects demographics data and various reflective items concerning choice of major. Part 2 collects respondents' definitions of ET majors and their confidence in their given answers. Previous research using the survey identified the dominate terms used by first-semester technology students to describe various ET majors, compared student conceptions of ET majors, and identified job titles that students associate with the ET majors. This follow-on study reports on an additional two years of data collection and expands the survey to include students from two additional ET majors. The ultimate goal of this research is to better understand the pre-conceived characterizations that students hold of ET majors and careers and to better gage their accuracy. Benchmark definitions of the ET majors are needed to evaluate student-reported responses from the AIC survey. The results from this study will help guide the design of recruiting efforts and first-year courses that address common misconceptions and misunderstandings regarding ET majors and careers.