The career pursuits of engineering students : inquiries into options, informedness, and intentions at the education-careers interface

Thesis: Ph. D. in the field of Engineering Workforce Dynamics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis examines how the career plans of U.S. engineering students shape the composition of the engineering workforce. The health of this workforce - including its demographic diversity and inflow of candidates with key skills - attracts substantial attention from employers, policymakers, and educators. Prior literature has identified patterns of systemic variation in career intentions among students in the engineering educational pipeline, where certain student subsets have exhibited a lower likelihood of pursuing traditionally categorized engineering occupations after engineering school compared to others. Examining these patterns of occupational intentions remains critical, as some of such patterns continue to hinder workforce development goals, including demographic diversification and retention of those with certain skills profiles. We began our investigation by constructing a multivariate occupational sorting model for engineering students that incorporates factors shown in prior studies to be associated with students' occupational outcomes. We empirically validated this model using survey data from a sample of 1,061 senior year engineering students. We present results showing how different occupational outcomes are associated, on average, with different student-specific characteristics. Next, we describe findings from a randomized survey experiment conducted upon the same student sample. Here, we investigated how experimental manipulation of engineering job attributes influences students' preferences for jobs. The experiment allowed us to draw causal inferences about how jobs' attributes interact with students' characteristics to explain variance in job preferences. We discuss the experiment's implications for enhancing candidate-career matching and for mitigating undue attrition from the engineering pipeline. We also present results from a systematic literature review examining the changing careers landscape faced by engineering students. Here, we identified core elements of traditional engineering jobs that endure in contemporary positions, and we characterize a set of increasingly prevalent engineering-related jobs that has arisen. We present a typology of engineering work built upon the review. The typology facilitates categorization of the engineering-relatedness of engineering graduates' diverse careers. We conclude by discussing how increased job market complexity strains engineering schools' ability to prepare students to make well-informed career decisions, and draw upon findings from the survey experiment to suggest ways that educators can remove impediments to ideal student-career matching.by James N. Magarian.Ph. D. in the field of Engineering Workforce Dynamic

Systems Engineering

The book "Systems Engineering: Practice and Theory" is a collection of articles written by developers and researches from all around the globe. Mostly they present methodologies for separate Systems Engineering processes; others consider issues of adjacent knowledge areas and sub-areas that significantly contribute to systems development, operation, and maintenance. Case studies include aircraft, spacecrafts, and space systems development, post-analysis of data collected during operation of large systems etc. Important issues related to "bottlenecks" of Systems Engineering, such as complexity, reliability, and safety of different kinds of systems, creation, operation and maintenance of services, system-human communication, and management tasks done during system projects are addressed in the collection. This book is for people who are interested in the modern state of the Systems Engineering knowledge area and for systems engineers involved in different activities of the area. Some articles may be a valuable source for university lecturers and students; most of case studies can be directly used in Systems Engineering courses as illustrative materials

American extreme: An ethnography of astronautical visions and ecologies

This dissertation is a coordinated ethnographic case study of environmental science, medicine, technology, and design in an American human spaceflight program. Its goal is to investigate how astronautics contributes to shaping "the environment" as an extensive contemporary category of knowledge, politics, and social action. Based on fieldwork conducted primarily at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s Johnson Space Center in Houston Texas from 2005 --- 2008, the study argues that, in practical and meaningful ways, ecology and cosmology are co-constituting in American astronautics. Using participant observation and archival data, the study evaluates how astronautics practitioners know and work with "the human environment" on a scope that includes vehicle habitats and the heliosphere and on scales ranging from the molecular to the cosmic. In this work, people shore up and break down unusual human/environment boundaries, making sense of what it means to do so in technoscientific as well as sociopolitical, symbolic, and transcendental terms. The four cases analyzed are: (1) how space analogue missions operate as simulations but also make arguments that extreme environments foster progress through confrontation with adversity, (2) how space biomedical subjecthood is fundamentally environmental rather than biological, (3) how "habitability" works as a key elaborating concept among space architects so that they can connect extraterrestrial and terrestrial habitation problems and solutions, and (4) how Near Earth comets and asteroids have moved from being obscure astronomical objects to objects of environmental policymaking that extends into the heliosphere and into the far future. The study's analysis brings social theory about the spatial politics of knowledge into dialogue with conceptual frameworks from the social studies of science, technology, and environment. As an ethnography of outer space as extreme environment rather than territorial frontier, the study highlights astronautics' connections to broader domains of environmental science and technology, and by discursive and practical extension, to a spectrum of American environmentalisms and engagements with extremity. In doing so, the study elaborates astronautics' role in making ecological knowledge, and attendant concepts like adaptation and evolution, cosmologically scalable

Challenges for engineering students working with authentic complex problems

Engineers are important participants in solving societal, environmental and technical problems. However, due to an increasing complexity in relation to these problems new interdisciplinary competences are needed in engineering. Instead of students working with monodisciplinary problems, a situation where students work with authentic complex problems in interdisciplinary teams together with a company may scaffold development of new competences. The question is: What are the challenges for students structuring the work on authentic interdisciplinary problems? This study explores a three-day event where 7 students from Aalborg University (AAU) from four different faculties and one student from University College North Denmark (UCN), (6th-10th semester), worked in two groups at a large Danish company, solving authentic complex problems. The event was structured as a Hackathon where the students for three days worked with problem identification, problem analysis and finalizing with a pitch competition presenting their findings. During the event the students had workshops to support the work and they had the opportunity to use employees from the company as facilitators. It was an extracurricular activity during the summer holiday season. The methodology used for data collection was qualitative both in terms of observations and participants’ reflection reports. The students were observed during the whole event. Findings from this part of a larger study indicated, that students experience inability to transfer and transform project competences from their previous disciplinary experiences to an interdisciplinary setting

Exploring the practical use of a collaborative robot for academic purposes

This article presents a set of experiences related to the setup and exploration of potential educational uses of a collaborative robot (cobot). The basic principles that have guided the work carried out have been three. First and foremost, study of all the functionalities offered by the robot and exploration of its potential academic uses both in subjects focused on industrial robotics and in subjects of related disciplines (automation, communications, computer vision). Second, achieve the total integration of the cobot at the laboratory, seeking not only independent uses of it but also seeking for applications (laboratory practices) in which the cobot interacts with some of the other devices already existing at the laboratory (other industrial robots and a flexible manufacturing system). Third, reuse of some available components and minimization of the number and associated cost of required new components. The experiences, carried out following a project-based learning methodology under the framework of bachelor and master subjects and thesis, have focused on the integration of mechanical, electronic and programming aspects in new design solutions (end effector, cooperative workspace, artificial vision system integration) and case studies (advanced task programming, cybersecure communication, remote access). These experiences have consolidated the students' acquisition of skills in the transition to professional life by having the close collaboration of the university faculty with the experts of the robotics company.Postprint (published version