Seeing the Big Picture: The Role that Undergraduate Work Experiences Can Play in the Persistence of Female Engineering Undergraduates

Internships and co-ops provide a variety of benefits to students who participate in them. This study describes the benefits that are accrued by female undergraduate engineering students who participate in internships and co-ops. The paper describes how internships and co-ops can enhance students’ learning, connect students with professionals in the industry and provide a taste of the future, all of which contribute to female students’ professional role and career-fit confidence. All of these benefits ultimately influence female students’ decisions to persist to graduation and pursue a career in engineering. The paper also describes how internship and coop experiences affected the education timelines of females who switched out of engineering into a different major.