Reading Reaction #3: Thinking Into the Future

It is always great to think about improving what is here and now but it is also extremely beneficial to be thinking about what is going to happen later on in the future as well. In the National Academy of Engineering (2004), the authors use the knowledge of what is known now about engineering and what engineering is currently constructed as to creating a goal to reshape engineering as they best see fit. Their major goals to succeed by 2020 include: valuing and understanding engineering education more, make engineers more historical and socially aware of the world’s challenges, push engineers towards leadership opportunities, and increase the diversity in recruitment and retention. From and Ethnic Studies viewpoint, I believe that they do cover two fundamentals of improving engineering education which is: in diversity and to become a “global engineer”. They state that it is important to “ethically assist the world in creating a balance in the standards of living for developing and developed countries alike” (National Academy of Engineering (2004), p. 51). I find this important because we need to focus on the good for all people rather than just looking out for ourselves. Plus, it is important to increase diversity, whether it be race, gender, socio-economic status, etc. With diverse engineers can come great ideas and innovation and potentially create different viewpoints in looking at certain aspects of engineering.

But after reading Hess’s piece, I am conflicted in believing whether all of this is possible. He points out that there is institutionalized racism and discrimination for women and people of color with the glass ceiling. He also discusses the importance of providing a more diverse staff to “provide diverse role models for the students” (Hess 252). Beyond that I also wonder if it would be better to hire younger professors who have had experiences with a slightly more diverse group of engineers or diverse undergraduate program rather than retain older professors who most likely only had most, if not all, White males in their undergraduate program. From interviewing a woman of color in engineering, I have learned this to be true. She stated that the younger professors were more engaged with students and more willing to help rather the older professors who tend to maintain a distance to her (this may not be true for all professors but for some). I think this may help create a more comfortable atmosphere by having a new generation of staff coming in who may have new goals in mind.

I believe that the goal of diversifying engineering is a great goal, but I really doubt that it will become diverse in 2020. I believe we are still far away in creating equality and equal opportunities, like in recruitment. We see this in Cal Poly where most of the students are from good high schools and from higher income homes, which do provide more opportunities and courses (such as AP courses) to excel. I do not know when this goal will actually be achieve, but I do have hope that we are progressing by focusing more on this problem and trying to do something about it.

Works Cited:

National Academy of Engineering (2004), “Chapter 3: Aspirations for the Engineer of 2020” (pp. 47-52) (in The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century).

Hess (1995), “Conclusions: Science, Technology & Multicultural Education”.

1st Year Female Engineers at Cal Poly to Assist Recruitment and Retention

Since my last research progress report, we have completed a lot of our project. Dr. Lehr edited and produced the final version of our survey. Some questions that we added was listing the three most important reasons for choosing engineer as their major; what other majors or universities did they consider switching to; their thoughts on what a “good engineer” should entail; and how they perceive their position in engineering compared to their male counterparts. I have just finished typing up all the questions onto Survey Monkey but we still need to format some of the questions better and figure out the range of some of the questions (questions like: what year are you born, when did you graduate high school). Also, there is not that many question formats on Survey Monkey, so I had to make separate some questions within questions. We also may want to think about how much room we should allow them to write. I kept a lot at 50 words, but we may want to extend the amount.

We also completed the IRB (Institutional Review Board) forms for the Human Subjects Committee, since we are giving our survey out to Cal Poly students and need to get an approval before having subjects take the survey. In the IRB packet, we included the Human Subjects Protocol Approval Form, Informed Consent Form, Cover Page, and our Final Survey Draft.

For the Human Subjects Protocol Approval Form, we projected the duration to be a year-long (from February 2011 to February 2012). We also have to include possible risks and what measure will be taken to minimize those risks. We included that there may be minor psychological risks that may occur and provided consultation from either Helene Finger, the director of Women’s Engineering Program and also a researcher for this project, and also Cal Poly’s Counseling and Psychological Services. Also, possible incentives for participations may be a raffle to be entered to win prizes that may include campus gifts. We only need a “minimal review” since there’s no deception of the subjects involved and there are not a lot of risks involved in our study and subjects are remained anonymous and cannot be identified by the researchers.

For our Informed Consent Form, we made it clear to our participants the possible risks and the consultation. We also inform them that it will take 20 to 30 minutes long, except now I think we should change it to 25 to 35 because of the increase amount of questions. We also made it clear that they will remain anonymous throughout the whole study and will never be asked to provide their name.

Our cover page basically stated our purpose and methods. Our purpose is to assist Cal Poly’s Women’s Engineering Program with the recruitment and retention of female engineering students. WEP (Women’s engineering program) will supply the contact information for the female engineering majors in College of Engineering and also BioResource and Agricultural Engineering (BRAE) and Architectural Engineering (ARCE) that is in other colleges.

We are very close to being done with all the preparations to send out the survey. We just need to edit the survey layout a bit on SurveyMonkey.com. Also, we need to wait for the approval from the Human’s Subjects Committee to continue on in our research project.

Global Thinkers and Diversity

It is very interesting to compare America’s individualistic mindset to Japan’s collectivist mindset. In America, there is constant competition and goal to get to the top. It is refreshing to hear about how another country is able to excel by having an extraordinary amount of “group effort and team spirit” (Honda 1). But this difference can be seen as both a negative and positive way. First off, the negative perspective is that there is very “little opportunity for individual creativity” (Honda 5) since the goal is to conform and have no disagreements. But in a positive light, this helps holds the group together and highlights the importance of teamwork and a sense of belonging to a group.

What I thought about most when reading the Americans working in Japan is how important it is to become a global engineer and learn how to be accepting and respectful of other cultures. Thinking about different cultures, I start to think about the United States. Especially in California, we are quite diverse and have many different people and people who have acculturated by combining U.S. culture with their own culture. But in Cal Poly, where there is such a lack of diversity, we don’t really get a chance to meet others who are different than ourselves. With a society comes dominant images and culture and it is inevitable to believe in that dominance when you have nothing else to compare it to. As a state school, we lack international students compared to private schools. How do we become understanding and accepting of others when we can’t even meet people with different cultures? And even if we did have people with different cultures at our school, how do we have everyone be able to get out of their own friends circle, which is usually a homogeneous group consisting people of their own race, and into a diverse circle?

Those who have been able to encounter different cultures have gained and thrived “as global thinkers, to make them far reaching in the way they look at things” (Legg), along with being able to learn how to work with different people in another culture. This idea of global thinkers is very similar to why diversity is a benefit. With different cultures, values, experiences, etc. comes different perspectives and thoughts that would help us not only in our education, such as in classroom discussions, but also for us as people to grow aware and accepting of someone different from ourselves. I’m not only talking about race and ethnicity but also other factors that shape a person like gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, religion, etc. I’m not saying that our engineers cannot become global engineers, but I think that diversity (a diverse staff and diverse student body) for Cal Poly can become a step and the beginning into becoming a thriving global engineer.

Honda (1992), “Working in Japan: An Insider’s Guide”.

Legg (1989), “American Engineers in Japan: Same Profession: Different World”.

Recruitment and Retention of Female Undergraduate Engineers

Beverley Kwang

Annotated Bibliography

Abstract

California Polytechnic State University’s Women’s Engineering Program (WEP) has made it their goal to help recruit and retain female engineers. With the undergraduate student body of the College of Engineering amounting to 85 percent men and 15 percent women, WEP is still working hard towards finding out exactly what attracts and who encourages women to engineering and their opinions and feelings on how their gender has influenced or had no influence on their undergraduate engineering experiences.

Fox, M.F, Sonnert, G., Nikiforova, I. (Jun. 2009). Successful Programs for Undergraduate Women in Science and Engineering: Adapting versus Adopting the Institutional Environment. Research in Higher Education, 50(4), 333-353.

The focus of this study was to look at the size, creativity, and diversity that women contribute to the scientific and engineering workforce (2), and also to question at the idea of social equity in these workforces. The researches focused on forty- nine programs in forty-five institutions in the United States that involve undergraduate women in science and engineering in the years of 2000 and 2001. They selected 10 programs to look at more in depth and judge which one is the 5 most successful programs and also the 5 least successful programs. They judged this off of the growth or decline of the percentage of women among bachelor degree recipients. The researchers conducted interviews with the program directors in person and through the phone. Some of the interview questions include:

1. definition of what is “at issue” for the participation/performance of women in undergraduate engineering and science,

2. solutions represented by activities undertaken in programs,

3. perceptions of what is important for a director of a program (personal characteristics and educational background),

4. linkeage between program and broader environment, including institution, administration, faculty, in which it exists,

5. aspirations and directions for future of the program. (7)

Problems that the directors of the programs saw were the limited numbers of women recruited and enrolled, faculty and classroom bias against under-represented groups, grading system that “weeds-out” students, and a “pipeline of support” for graduate study that is less helpful to women than men undergraduates (8). This really relates to what we talked about in class with the pipeline for engineering education and the weeding out of women and people of color in engineering. The most successful programs also saw that solutions that can help out women undergraduates are mentoring, residence hall clusters, hands-on research experience, and faculty involvement (10). Also, those who are most successful found better relationships to institutional context. They saw a more active stance with the institutional environment and were seeking for broader associations and links to networks.

Harris, B.J., Rhoads, T.R., Walden, S.E., Murphy, T.J., Meissler, R., Reynolds, A. (Spring 2004). Gender Equity in Industrial Engineering: A Pilot Study. NWSA Journal, 16(1), 186-193.

This article studies the University of Oklahoma’s Industrial Engineering Department and found out that they have achieved gender equity in fall 2003. Fifty percent of the undergraduate program was females and forty percent of the faculty was females. They found out that only two of the six female undergraduates they interviewed had parents (in both case, the fathers) with a STEM background. They also found out that they relied on their mothers in regards to their undergraduate education (190). This may be a question that we may be interested in asking our interviewees: who do you go to for help or guidance regarding your undergraduate education (190). The researchers also found out that the female students were exposed to computers later than the male students (late childhood to adulthood and early childhood to early adolescence, respectively) (190). I thought it was a good question to ask the interviewees what they like about their majors (which all of the females responded that they liked the people orientation rather than the males’ response of interest in management (191)). I was also interested how they found out how some females encountered a series of male’s sexist behaviors. I would like to go further and ask how did they deal with or handle these negative responses from others.

Parviainen, M.L. (Fall 2008). The experiences of women in computer science: the importance of awareness and communication. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 6(4), 87-94.

Although this study was not done on women in engineering, I believe women in computer science have experiences similar to women in engineering, due to the lack of women in these fields. Like other studies done, this study focused on the influence of parents, who have similar jobs (i.e. engineering, computer science), have on their own choice in their major. They also found a significant influence due to female teachers subjects had, which led them to that same choice. The researcher also found out that female students in computer science programs were far less exposed to computer science comparing to their male classmates. What was different about this article from other articles was that the author mentions the importance that stereotypes of computer scientists (i.e. white, antisocial males) have on women (4). This article suggested questions that I would like to add to our survey such as: what was the subject’s stereotypes of engineering and how has that affected them, in a negative or positive way? And if they did, how have they overcome those stereotypes? Also, how do they see themselves as a minority in their major and classroom atmosphere?

Sinkele, C.S, Mupinga, D.M. (Jan. 2011). The Effectiveness of Engineering Workshops in Attracting Females into Engineering Fields: A Review of the Literature. Clearing House, 84(1), 37-42.

Workshops are created to get more females interested in engineering. Questions that they listed that is relevant to our study are: what factors influence girls to study in engineering fields (3), does having a family member who is an engineer help increase the interests and knowledge in engineering (4). The researchers found out that workshops consisting of only females make it more comfortable for the girls because they won’t feel like they are being compared to boys and have less fear of failing.

Then, they focused on a study done by Anderson and Gilbride (2007) and listed specific questions from their study:

1. How knowledgeable of and interested in engineering were Toronto-area high school students?

2. Did having an engineer as a family member increase knowledge/interest in engineering?

3. Did the educational environment, co-ed versus all-girl, influence a girl’s knowledge/interest in engineering?

4. Did a hands-on engineering content workshop increase the student’s knowledge/interest in engineering?

Questions that I thought were good to ask are questions number 2 and 3. And also what workshops or activities did the students participate in.

Vogt, C.M., Hocevar, D., Hagedorn, L.S. (May/June 2007). A social Cognitive Construct Validation: Determining Women’s and Men’s Engineering Programs. The Journal of Higher Education, 78(3), 337-364.

This paper notes that women are the majority in humanities and arts, except only make up one-fourth of the degrees in computer science and less than one-fifth of the degrees in physics. In engineering, only nineteen percent of the undergraduate and master’s programs are women. The authors used seven hundred engineers to look at the environmental variables, which includes discrimination and academic integration, and also looked at self variables, which included academic self-confidence and self-efficacy. This qualitative study was helpful in mapping out the relationships between GPA and self-efficacy. They also found that discrimination had the biggest relationship with self confidence/ self efficacy. The findings had found that females felt greater discrimination than males. The flaws with this article were that the statistics were gathered in 2000, a decade ago. This can contribute to our study by seeing if GPA actually has a relationship with self confidence and their comfort with the major.

Research Progress Report #1 | Beverley Kwang

This quarter I am working with Dr. Lehr and Dr. Finger, the director of the Women’s Engineering Program, to do a research study to ultimately help out with recruitment and retention of female undergraduate engineers at Cal Poly. I have always been interested in this topic and am looking to do my senior project on this subject, specifically of the experiences of female engineers and their view of the lack of women in engineering fields. I also particularly want to focus on women of color in engineering who are said to lead a “double minority status” (Farro) in their major. But for this quarter, with Dr. Finger’s research, I am primarily focusing on trying to figure out how to aim for a higher recruitment and high retention rates of female undergraduate engineers.

So far, the goal is to create a survey to ask first year female students (I think we are still debating if we should ask males or non-first years) specific questions as to what go them interested in engineering and so forth. We have done a literature review, in a sense, to see what has been already done and see what questions other researchers have asked. There were some very interesting finds that I thought would be interesting to include in our survey as well. One that I thought was very interesting was that most female students at the University of Oklahoma’s Industrial Engineering Department, which is actually fifty percent female in their undergraduate program and forty percent female in their faculty, relied on their mothers in regards to their undergraduate education (Harris 190). In another study, the researcher found out the significance that female teachers had on their female students in regards to their interest in engineering (Parviainen).

Based on these articles, many female undergraduates in engineering seem to have been influenced by and relied on other females in their life for support and help. That is one question I would like to ask in our survey. So for our draft survey, I included questions such as: how did you get interested in engineering and whether or not their parents are engineers or not. We are also interested in knowing their ethnicity and socioeconomic status. It is also interesting to see if they have been in any clubs before college that has driven their interest in engineering and exactly how they got interested in studying engineering. There are deeper questions regarding their role in classrooms, whether they have been discouraged by others because of their gender, and points of deflection or overcoming of a negative situation. It is also interesting to see the stereotypes or preconceived notions that these female undergraduates had before entering cal Poly. Like in Parviainen’s study, female undergraduates saw stereotypes of computer scientists as white males who are antisocial, and they went deeper as to how these stereotypes affected and shaped them. Also, I included in our draft survey when comparing to other female undergraduate engineers how they feel, and when comparing to male undergraduate engineers how they feel. I just followed the same questions that Goodman et al. asked when self evaluating themselves to other female or males do they: spend more time and efforts in your class, understand engineering concepts better, better at solving engineering problems, more committed to engineering, work better with other people, have more confidence in your engineering abilities (50).

We are still in the producing and editing the survey and will go over it on Thursday.

Works Cited

Farro, S.A. (2010). Achievements and challenges of undergraduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields in the Ronald E. McNair Program. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering, 70(11-B), 7266-7275.

Goodman, I.F., Cunningham, C.M., Lachapelle, C., Thompson, M., Bittinger, K. Brennan, R.T., Delci, M. (April 2002). A Comprehensive Evaluation of Women in Engineering Programs. Goodman Research Group, Inc., 1-286.

Harris, B.J., Rhoads, T.R., Walden, S.E., Murphy, T.J., Meissler, R., Reynolds, A. (Spring 2004). Gender Equity in Industrial Engineering: A Pilot Study. NWSA Journal, 16(1), 186-193.

Parviainen, M.L. (Fall 2008). The experiences of women in computer science: the importance of awareness and communication. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 6(4), 87-94.