The influence of curriculum and internship culture on developing ethical technologists: A case study of the University of Waterloo

The past decade has witnessed an influx of attention to promoting ethical and responsible tech design from within the industry as well as across governmental and academic sectors. In response to these appeals, this paper engages with engineering ethics education and its approaches to developing ethically competent and socially responsible graduates. Through a case study of the University of Waterloo (uWaterloo), Canada, we observed that ethics curriculum in engineering and tech-related disciplines is not the sole influence of the burgeoning technologist’s ethical reasoning skills, but that cooperative (co-op) education and internship culture play a significant role as students are exposed to the ethos of the innovation-driven tech industry that permeates uWaterloo and surrounding Kitchener-Waterloo region. We suggest that the cultural religiosity of co-op education, epitomized through an omnipresent “Cali[fornia]-or-Bust” mindset, results in a distortion of motives toward practicing responsible tech design. This study draws upon survey responses of undergraduate engineering students from a communications course which focused on the ethical dimensions of engineering work. The results indicate that students recognize the importance of ethics but struggle to relate these principles to other courses, projects, and their co-op roles. To this end, we conclude that there is an ethical disconnect between engineering curriculum and the culture of tech-based co-op education, resulting in a de-emphasis of ethical and responsible practice to future graduates. Future work will need to consider alternative approaches to teaching ethics that account for the range of students’ educational and work-related experiences, as well as take an ethnographic perspective on the coop and internship culture that exists at uWaterloo and other schools with similar models of integrated work-study.