High-Enrollment Mechanical Engineering Programs Meeting the Challenge of Career Advising Through a Seminar Course

How are engineering students receiving career guidance? Campus career services tend to provide high-level career exploration tools and are generally underutilized by students. Within academic departments, particularly those with a significantly high student population (for the purposes of this study, considered to be over 800), individualized career advisement can be challenging to meet with excellence. Two such programs in mechanical engineering at Pennsylvania State University and Texas A&M University have taken a different approach. Career advisement has been incorporated into a seminar course. A preliminary study was conducted to assess the course effectiveness by surveying students enrolled in the corresponding seminars. This paper describes how both courses are structured and presents a discussion of results from the student survey. Overall, curricular-based career advisement is shown to be an effective way to reach a large number of students, equip them with knowledge to make informed career choices, and guide them in an approach to lifelong learning. Background—Why Career Advisement The benefits of a degree in mechanical engineering are far-reaching. As one of the broadest engineering majors, mechanical engineering offers training in areas that range from thermal fluid sciences to mechatronics to machine design. In the ideal program, students are also given a taste of industry work through team activities, project-based course content, or a required engineering work experience. Mechanical engineering graduates have the opportunity to join any number of industries, and are indeed highly sought-after for their problem solving skills and technical breadth. Yet, mechanical engineering students are generally not provided with guidance on matching their interests with one of the multitude of jobs or non-traditional career paths available to them. Students are also lacking direction on skills so desperately needed beyond technical proficiency and the ability to work in teams. Understanding business practices, creating an effective online persona, and securing a solid financial future, for example, are competencies learned, at best, only through the motivation of an individual. At worst, students acquire such insight too late, after their careers are well underway. A key problem is that most students do not know where gaps in their knowledge exist. Especially in larger programs, the availability of mentors who can fill these knowledge gaps is limited. Furthermore, gaining a comprehensive understanding of such “life skills” requires time and effort; unsurprisingly, the time required for mastering technical content assumes a more permanent fixture in a student’s schedule. Universities generally staff career services offices for their students, offering a host of resources on finding internships, writing resumes and cover letters, and practicing effective interview strategies. However, nearly 40% of students never even visit their universities’ career services offices [1]. Disseminating useful information on career and professional development, therefore, must occur through the individual department. And, the timing of such exposure should be such that the student can contextualize any career advice received; giving students advice in interview strategies, for example, when they are in the midst of finding internships is more effective than advice given pre-college, which is naturally proffered in the hypothetical. Exposing mechanical engineering students to the vast opportunities available to them, as such opportunities become available to them, is a key first step in having them take ownership of their future, professional selves. While some programs incorporate project-based and experiential learning activities into their courses [2], [3] to facilitate career advisement, the authors have chosen to utilize a seminar course method. Certainly, career development courses have been implemented at other universities in their engineering departments. Much like the courses in the current study, some courses at other universities have been tailored toward specific majors, such as electrical engineering [4] or biomedical engineering [5]. Others, such as one described by Sharp and Rowe [6], are offered for all engineering majors at a relatively small university; others still are integrated into the universities’ co-operative education programs [7] or career services [8], [9]. The timing of each of these courses varies from the students’ first year [2], [5] to their senior year [10], and topics covered range from resume and cover letter writing to ethics to interviewing strategies. One program [11] also touches upon personal finances, and navigating benefits and retirement savings. These existing courses have proved effective and are useful to the students who have enrolled. The goal for the courses in the current paper, however, is to make these courses mandatory for all students in the mechanical engineering program in order that all students can benefit from professional training and timely career advisement. In this paper, professional development and career advisement courses from two universities are presented with some initial results on the impact of the course material. The courses are unique in that they are integrated into the mechanical engineering curriculum and expose undergraduate students to a variety of topics typically overlooked in conventional classroom discussions. Seminar Course Description Pennsylvania State University The advising course at Pennsylvania State UniversityUniversity Park is split into two, halfcredit courses, one each taken in the fall semesters of a student’s junior and senior year. Each course spans eight weeks, with one new online learning module introduced each week; the modules are structured such that a discussion of the week’s topic is offered first, with a graded assignment given at the end. Discussion content is shared with students through online periodicals, instructional videos, case studies, and worksheets. The content in each course was curated specifically to address the students’ relevant needs. The timing of the course offering in junior year is critical because students are first entering their specific discipline at that time: content is focused on developing plans for themselves and identifying goals. In the senior year course, content is focused on helping students properly assess full-time job offers and adjust to life beyond college. This course is novel in that the content is all online, is interactive, and disseminates necessary life skills to a large number of students. The junior year course is focused on career development, and includes, as examples, instruction on creating a career plan, establishing an effective online presence, evaluating higher education, and identifying career paths for mechanical engineers. For example, one of the biggest takeaways from the junior-level course for the students is a LinkedIn page, which comes after a discussion on the importance of creating a professional online persona. The students are invited to join a LinkedIn group with their peers, allowing everyone to learn from each other’s profiles as well as endorse each other’s skills. Another key takeaway from the junior-level course comes in a personal reflection of the student’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (also known as a SWOT analysis). The discussion in this particular module begins with an analysis of skills (personal strengths) that are valued by potential future employers [12]. Then, the focus shifts to a discussion on why identifying strengths alone is insufficient when considering what the students can offer future employers. The SWOT analysis is meant to imbue a stronger understanding of the external factors in students’ lives that can help, or perhaps hinder, them in the future. In the senior year course, the focus is on professional development: students revisit their career plans, study ethics, learn responsible personal finance, and discover the values of lifelong learning. For example, students leave the senior-level course with a detailed personal financial plan, as well as greater financial literacy. The students take their starting salaries (either known or hypothetical), and deduct calculated amounts for benefits, retirement (employer-sponsored and/or individual), taxes, loans, rent, and savings for rainy day funds. Throughout the module, a discussion on each of these deductions and their various options is offered and includes links or short videos as appropriate. At the end of the senior-level course, students are asked to create a lifelong learning plan for themselves. The module discussion is focused on the realities of the current workforce [13], and emphasizes the need to be proactive with either formal or informal continued education. In their lifelong learning plans, the students identify new skills they want to learn, the time period in which they hope to learn said skill, and the resources they will use to acquire such knowledge. In both courses, assignments are submitted online and, in general, are file uploads, with some discussion questions as appropriate. Assignments were designed in such a way that they should be useful to the students in the future; their career plans, financial plans, and lifelong learning plans, as examples, were encouraged to be live documents, and to be revisited by the students as their life circumstances change. Both courses were piloted in the 2017-18 school year. The junior level course was offered to 17 juniors in fall 2017; the senior level course was piloted to 24 students, both juniors and seniors, in spring 2018. The course was created by the Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering Department Head, the Head of the Undergraduate Department, and a post-doctoral scholar in the department. The intent of both courses is to offer them to all mechanical engineering students in the department, which