Where does the Personal Fit within Engineering Education? An Autoethnography of one Student's Exploration of Personal-Professional Identity Alignment

This paper presents an exploration of personal-professional identity alignment through the use of an autoethnography. To understand identity and identity formation, my research advisor and I drew from post-modernist perspectives of identity as being highly contextualized, co-created between the individual and their surroundings, and neither singular nor stagnant. I am a senior, male undergraduate engineering student who worked as a research assistant in a separate engineering education study on engineers’ imaginaries of “the public.” My exposure to documents and interviews associated with this work began to illuminate and sometimes even change my views of personal identity, my understanding of my engineering identity, my perception of core values within the engineering profession, and how those elements interacted. Analysis of three of my journal entries through a lens of identity formation showed evidence of misalignment between my personal and professional identity expectations and experiences. This misalignment brought into question for me my fit within “the system” – the way I was trained, what I was trained for, and the larger views of the engineering profession with respect to how I should contribute to society. Introduction One way to look at many of the challenges facing the engineering community is to focus on the ways in which engineering systems (educational or professional) relate to the individual. From K-12 outreach for encouraging interest in engineering, to first-year undergraduate programs for retaining incoming students through graduation, to transition work for understanding why some graduates pursue engineering careers and others do not – these efforts all involve discussions about how the individual fits or does not fit within “the system” and what the individual can do to help develop a better fit. For example, several studies have looked at the effects of a non-inclusive culture in engineering and how to make students, especially those from underrepresented groups, more resilient in this “chilly” environment 1-3. Additionally, research suggests that the degree to which the individual’s personality aligns with the dominant values of the environment they are in, such as an engineering program, the higher their likelihood for satisfaction and success in that environment4. Some recent studies have begun to look at the engineering culture itself to see if, instead of programs to help make students more resilient, there might be ways to make the engineering environment more malleable. However, there exists immense rigidity in educational systems that try, generally, to employ one-size-fits-all approaches to education, largely ignoring (or even never asking) how the system fits or does not fit within the individual and what the leaders of the system can do to foster a better personal-professional identity alignment, when such alignment does not already exist. This paper explores the question of personal-professional identity alignment and, by extension, individual fit within “the system,” through an autoethnography. Autoethnography is a qualitative research and writing technique that combines traditional autobiographical and ethnographic methods to examine personal experiences in order to gain insight into the larger and multi-faceted culture in which these experiences take place5. This approach places value on the subjectivity of the researcher, acknowledging the inherent bi-directional influences between this individual and the culture they are studying. The autoethnography herein focuses on one student’s experiences of identity formation and reflection spurred by his involvement in a research project about engineers’ imaginaries of “the public.” These experiences are discussed in three journal entries and analyzed with the lens of identity formation described below. Through this research, the student was able to gain a deeper understanding of experiences foundational to his personal and professional identities as well as throw into relief core cultural dimensions of engineering education. The process opened for the student a new set of questions concerning his fit within “the system.” Identity Formation In this study, we draw from post-modernist perspectives of identity as being highly contextualized, co-created between the individual and their surroundings, and neither singular nor stagnant. One’s identity, according to these perspectives, is informed within and by the social contexts in which one operates6. We use the model of “communities of practice,” 7 which refers to learning that occurs in groups through participation and practice, to look at cultural and structural elements of engineering education that are taught informally and implicitly and how these elements might influence professional identity formation. This theoretical lens has been used in several studies examining the cultural production of engineering identities 8-10. Related to “communities of practice” is the concept of “communitarianism”, which also informs our analysis. “Communitarianism” focuses on traditions and social context of a learning community. Looking at a broader range of professions, Reid et al.11 used the concept of “communitarianism”, which focuses on traditions and social context of a learning community, to explore the professional formation of college students, including some engineers. They found that the learning community itself contributes to students’ “sense of being” in that students align their personal and professional identities with respect to the qualities they see or derive from their academic field. In this study, the autoethnography is an examination of the first author’s position in the “community of practice” of engineering education. Through reflexive inquiry, the first author explores his evolving identity and relationship with the culture of the engineering profession, as this culture manifests itself in messages from engineering peers, faculty, and professional documents. Furthermore, he explores the multiple facets of his identity in varying contexts, all toward better understanding his “sense of being” within the engineering profession. In his study of how professionals learn to fit in as they progress to new roles in their organizations, Ibarra 12 used the term “provisional selves” to talk about the experimental phases of identity formation as one adjusts to new expectations and sometimes even new organizational cultures. He witnessed several forms of experimentation that advancing professionals use, including imitation, efforts to remain true to one’s self and ideals, and use of internal and external feedback mechanisms to evaluate their developing “provisional selves.” Ibarra defined these strategies as “the degree of congruence between what one feels and what one communicate[s] in public behavior about one’s character or competence”12 (p.778). With its focus on personal-professional identity alignment, this autoethnography employs the second form of experimentation, “true-to-self strategies”, to identify overlaps and gaps between his personal and professional identities. In other words, this autoethnography serves as a vehicle for the exploration of the first author’s “provisional self” during the transitional period of senior year and, by extension, his fit within “the system” and “the system’s” fit within himself. Research Context The larger study in which the first author served as an undergraduate research assistant focused on engineers’ imaginaries of “the public.” This work draws on a theoretical framework of social imaginaries13 to see how engineers conceptualize “the public” and how these views may affect the ways in which they approach real-world problems with diverse stakeholders. A framework of social imaginaries focuses on “the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations”13 (p.106). Examining engineers’ social imaginaries of “the public” focuses on perceptions of “the public,” formal and informal processes that shape these perceptions, and how these perceptions are expressed through interactions between engineers and diverse publics with which they interact. The first step in this broader study was thematic analysis of 14 key engineering documents such as the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) report Educating the Engineer of 2020 14 and the American Society of Civil Engineer’s Body of Knowledge V.2 15, for institutionally sanctioned characterizations of the public, definitions of the proper relationship between engineers and the public, and visions of the role of engineers/engineering in society see 16. Coding these documents – which was carried out through a collaboration between this paper’s three authors – was one of two experiences that the first author explored in his journal entries. The second experience was his transcription of interviews, conducted by the second and third authors, with engineering students and faculty concerning their conceptions of “the public” and views about the relationship between engineering and “the public.” The first author was not present during these interviews. However, his transcription of the interviews was disclosed to all interviewees as part of the study’s informed consent process. Authorship In light of the fact that this paper was written collaboratively and the coauthors had relatively distinct roles, we would like to clarify who authored which sections. The introduction, literature review, description of the research context and methods were largely written by the second author, an engineering professor who is a Principal Investigator (PI) on the broader study on social imaginaries and a research advisor to the first author. The journal entries, their development into more formal narratives, the short analysis