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This research paper uses an auto-ethnographic approach to highlight experiences of women of color who are international in U.S. engineering workforce and classrooms. Three preliminary themes are highlighted in this paper. The first is the theme related to the notion of Excellence, and how the definitions of success for immigrating or international engineers may be tied to maintaining visa status. The second theme centers around the lack of Sense of Belonging expressed by participant-authors. The final theme was around Chasing the American Dream and the resultant sacrifices. We hope this paper not only provides an overview of some of the unique challenges faced by international women of color, but also drives more interest in better understanding this oft-overlooked group in engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant cultures within academic institutions that educate and train the next generations of STEM professionals tend to privilege long-held majority perspectives of knowing, thinking, and doing in science and engineering. To more intentionally recruit and include diverse groups of students into our educational programs, it is imperative that we develop and adopt unique pedagogical and assessment approaches that move beyond didactics, leverage experiential learning, and embrace a variety of student backgrounds and identities. In this paper, we demonstrate how visual methods-based assessments can serve as an impactful alternative to more traditional forms. We start by introducing three examples currently used in STEM curricula, and then by describing how these assessments promote autonomy and creativity as students make meaning of STEM and of themselves as STEM professionals. We conclude the description of each assessment example by identifying key considerations for STEM instructors when attempting to implement such assessments in their own contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of the vast amount of literature that focuses on the need for significantly more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates, the importance of a student finding a good career fit, and what makes a student employable, little research exists on undergraduate engineering students' understanding of the process of how to find, qualify for, and secure a preferred first position after graduation (FPAG). Likewise, it is important for research to consider nuanced distinctions within STEM fields to assist research to practice transitions. Competition in securing jobs upon graduation is expected to continue, including for engineering positions. In fact, even in a market of high demand for STEM graduates, employers need candidates that display the skills, interests, and readiness to be successful employees. A gap remains in understanding how prepared students feel and how they improve their preparedness to obtain their preferred FPAG, in particular within a specific discipline under the STEM domain. To explore this gap, we sought to answer these research questions: 1) What are students' self-rated perceptions of preparedness for their preferred FPAG and how do they compare to externally applied ratings? 2) What are common characteristics of preparedness levels? Our research has important implications for all career decision-maker socializers. Our findings reveal that students may not be accurate with their self-assessment of preparedness for the job acquisition process. In fact, they overrated their preparedness in several cases. It is likely that students are overestimating their abilities because they lack an accurate understanding of what the career development process entails. We offer pragmatic suggestions for faculty and career counselors on how to support students with this career development process. These findings are also relevant to career development professionals as they advise entry level professionals on career advancement strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress paper shares ongoing findings from a mixed-methods systematic literature review that seeks to examine the retention of women in the engineering professoriate. We identified literature from EBSCOHost and Engineering Village that discussed women in the engineering professoriate in relation to either retention or persistence or both, as explicitly stated in their abstract. Following an initial review of 191 titles, 48 papers passed our inclusion criteria; further qualitative analysis of abstracts yielded 31 papers, which underwent a full paper review. Our ongoing findings suggest the following: a) research on the retention of women in engineering professoriate is being supported by grants and funding opportunities; b) the reviewed literature documented six barriers faced by women in the engineering professoriate: isolation of women faculty, work/life balance, inequitable distribution of service, underrepresentation of women faculty, implicit bias, and departmental resources; and c) although journal scholarship on this topic is not limited to popular engineering education publishing venues, conference scholarship are mainly from those popular in the field, such as the ASEE Annual Conference and the Frontiers in Education Conference. Future work will share the extent to which the reviewed literature discussed interventions to recruit or retain women in the engineering professoriate, and whether these interventions vary by the type of institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the opportunity gap for comics in engineering education, through reflections from a team redesigning a mechanical engineering syllabi using illustrations. To increase a sense of belonging among diverse students, the authors of this paper propose a graphic narrative focused on the curriculum of the mechanical engineering department at a large public university in Western United States. We hope that this paper addresses the underutilized and largely missed opportunity to add engagement, better conceptual understanding, and improve inclusion in engineering classrooms through incorporating visual illustrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use an autoethnographic approach to describe first-hand the experiences and learnings from ideating, developing, and launching a book series enabling young learners, especially girls, to familiarize themselves with STEM. The primary authors are high school students and recent graduates, who are also founders of STEM initiatives for young learners. With the help of three engineering educators, they use their individual self-narratives to address the tripartite goals of this Innovation in Engineering Teaching Practices paper: 1) to share their story of why books for children developed by children are needed to promote STEM, 2) to delve deeper into learnings and accomplishments as they co-author the book series and reflect on how this work shaped their identities as storytellers and affected their interests in Engineering Education, and 3) to develop a deeper understanding of the broad question of how engineering-related interactions with peers helped develop their own commitment to the professions of engineering and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work in progress is a mixed-methods systematic review that addresses the gap in literature specific to the conversation around how the engineering professoriate retains women in the field. The National Analysis of Diversity in Science and Engineering Faculties at Research Universities has shown that there is a significant underrepresentation of women faculty within the field of science and engineering. In this work-in-progress paper we report on a mixedmethods systematic review of literature conducted to explore the retention of women in the engineering professoriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most higher education institutions have a mission and/or vision statement that are designed to communicate with a variety of audiences. These statements are developed strategically by organizations and often reflect the college's unique vision which sets it apart from peer institutions. Analytical techniques which rely on word usage, semantic information, and metadata information can be used to generate powerful descriptive models with allow us to obtain relevant information from text-based data. This study presents a Natural Language Processing (NLP) based textual data analytical approach using Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (tf-idf) to study the mission statements of engineering colleges/schools. A total of 59 engineering colleges/schools: 29 public, and 30 private, across the United States were analyzed in this study. Results of this study indicate that there is indeed a difference in tf-idf scores for public versus private engineering colleges. Tf-idf scores were computed for word tokens in the corpora, to go beyond frequency and capture relevance of a token for a given document. The contribution of this research is in the form of tables graphically summarizing the comparative word usage and providing a descriptive overview of the vocabulary of word tokens extracted from the statements analyzed. Topical grouping based on categories seen in existing literature was also conducted to analyze the comparative occurrence of tokens based on categories across the institutions. This study introduces a novel method for using NLP to analyze mission statements of colleges. Further, this study can help inform strategies on formation of mission and vision statements for universities by allowing administrators insight into vocabulary used across public and private colleges in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]