Engineering Leadership Development Program – a Tenth-year Review and Assessment

In 2007, the University of Kentucky College of Engineering created the Pigman Leadership Development Program. The program had the following three objectives: (1) to develop the next generation of leaders from the college, (2) to expand students’ expectations of the potential of their careers, and (3) to instill in the students a responsibility for “giving back”, including through civic engagement and professional engagement. Each year, the program accepted only fifteen upper-level engineering students for a one-hour semester course that included study of literature on leadership, extensive interactions with successful alumni, and development on professional skills. The program completed its tenth year in 2017. Alumni of the program over those ten years were surveyed regarding how the program has made a difference in their life and career. In this paper, we outline the structure of the Pigman Leadership Development Program and how different elements of the program contribute toward the program objectives. We then describe results of a survey of students over the ten year period of the program. The goal of the survey is to determine student perceptions of the influence of the program on their preparation for leadership opportunities, the influence of the program on the students’ self-perception of their leadership potential, and the influence of the program on the students’ responsibility to “give back”. We consider both self-reported objective measures and respondents’ subjective evaluations of influence of the program. Given that the data extends over ten years of students, we consider how responses differ as the respondents are further into their career since their graduations. We also consider evidence of the alumni’s engagement in and support of the college as one measure of civic and professional engagement, one of the objectives of the program.