Fostering 21st Century Skills in Engineering Undergraduates through Co-Curricular Involvement

As engineering institutions attempt to prepare their students for today’s global, cross-disciplinary workplace, incorporation of 21 century “soft” skills into classroom-based engineering education has become the practice of many colleges and universities in the United States and elsewhere. While this method may prove effective in many cases, this paper presents an alternative approach to fostering these skills in engineering education: student skill development through cocurricular involvement. For this analysis, we focus on undergraduate engineering education, as we ground our framework in the existing student affairs literature on the benefits of undergraduate student involvement. While this literature thoroughly examines the benefits of co-curricular engagement on the wide community of undergraduates, few existing studies examine the impact of this phenomenon through an engineering education lens. The purpose of this research is to create a framework categorizing how specific types of student involvement – such as engagement in the arts, athletics, or student government organizations – can impact competency development in undergraduate engineering students. To accomplish this goal, this paper draws upon an extensive review of student involvement literature to develop a framework of the skills and attributes developed through specific categories of undergraduate cocurricular involvement organized through a case analysis of student clubs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The connection of this framework to engineering education is then validated through interview data collected from supervisors of entry-level engineering graduates. Based on this validation analysis, 19 skills and attributes relevant to engineering education and practice are shown to be developed through co-curricular involvement at the undergraduate level; based on these findings, the authors propose recommendations for administrators at undergraduate technical institutions regarding expanded support of co-curricular activities for undergraduate engineering students.