Developing the Entrepreneurial Self: Integrating Professional Growth in an Engineering Design and Entrepreneurship Course Sequence.

In the Department of Engineering Education and Leadership at the University of Texas at El Paso, we have a required two-course sequence at the junior level covering engineering design and engineering entrepreneurship. In its original embodiment, we knew that our students learned a great deal about product-market fit, design, and business models, but the course lacked content that provided direct learning about the students' aspirations, professional growth, and career planning. To address this gap, we integrated design thinking about the students' own lives into the formal content of the courses, using "Designing Your Life" (DYL) as one of our textbooks. Our idea was that the empirical design methodologies of Lean Launchpad and DYL would be mutually reinforcing--enabling each student to apply the hypothesis-testing approach of Lean Launchpad to his or her own professional development. Based on an in-class survey and a follow-up interview, data from two cohorts of students in this course sequence suggest that the DYL content made a difference in some students' planning and life choices. About a third of the students reported changing their career plans in some way. Some of the DYL activities were more helpful than others. While no student found all of the activities had meaning for them, each of the DYL activities had meaning for some students. However, most of the students did not see the DYL content and the courses' design and entrepreneurship content as mutually reinforcing. Future use of DYL should continue to maintain a variety of activities while strengthening the connection between the DYL activities and the design and entrepreneurship content of the courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]