Engineering Student Recruiters: A Review Of The Role Of Women As Peer Recruiters For Potential Engineering Students

For the last three years, the UT Arlington College of Engineering has had a group of undergraduate peer recruiters. These student recruiters represent UTA Engineering at college fairs, at University Preview Days, and on classroom visits to area high schools accompanying the Engineering staff recruiter. The student recruiters lead hands-on engineering activities in high school classrooms, do follow up contacts with potential students, answer questions from potential students and parents, help prepare material for recruiting events, and do other tasks to support the recruiting efforts of the University. In this paper, we will discuss how the recruiting process works including what types of classrooms are visited. We will review the impact of the engineering student recruiters on our recruiting efforts, the benefits of the student recruiter program to potential students, and the logistics of managing this recruiting staff. We will look at the balance of male to female peer recruiters and this same balance in the College as a whole as well as the qualitative impact of female and male peer recruiters in the high school classrooms and at other recruiting venues. We will also discuss the benefits of being a peer recruiter student and what impact it has on the recruiting students themselves. The paper has female student peer recruiters as co-authors. What is peer recruiting? The University of Texas at Arlington College of Engineering uses many approaches to recruit students. In 2003, the College hired a full-time staff undergraduate recruiter to work on increasing engineering enrollments. The staff recruiter visits high schools and represents UTA Engineering at college fairs. Typically high school visits are arranged with an individual math, science, computer science, or engineering teacher at a high school and the recruiter stays to talk with many classes during the day. Since a large percentage of our student population is from the surrounding cities (Arlington sits in the middle of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex), the recruiter makes day visits to schools in the 17 school districts in our immediate area then takes infrequent longer trips to schools further from our base. UT Arlington also participates in college fairs across the state including fairs hosted by individual schools, by school districts and by areas. The College of Engineering sends recruiting representatives to some of these fairs based on the populations of students that they target. In Fall semester 2006 it was decided to hire undergraduate engineering students to work as peer recruiters under the direction of the staff recruiter. The goal of the student peer recruiters was to better connect with our target audience for recruiting. These student peer recruiters, also called student ambassadors, represent UTA Engineering at college fairs, at University Preview Days, and on classroom visits to area high schools accompanying the Engineering staff recruiter. The student recruiters lead hands-on engineering activities in high school classrooms, do follow up P ge 14559.2 contacts with potential students, answer questions from potential students and parents, help prepare material for recruiting events, and do other tasks to support the recruiting efforts of the University. As part of the classroom visits or fairs, prospective students are asked for their name, contact info and area of engineering interest. The data for these potential students is kept in the College and is passed to the UTA admissions and recruiting department for follow-up. The follow-up activities may include calling the prospective student with information or to answer any questions the student might have. Other follow-up can come in the form of e-mails or other communication. Peer recruiters also make calls to students who have applied to UTA COE and students who have been offered a UTA Engineering scholarship to build relationships with them and answer questions. Why do we have peer recruiters and how does this program work? Our goal for having peer recruiters is to better connect with our prospective student population. Peer recruiters serve in a variety of roles. Below one of the current peer recruiters describes some aspects that she focuses on when talking with prospective students: “UTA’s close proximity to two major cities has resulted in a large populous of high school students expressing interest in a university that is less than 30 miles from their childhood home. Therefore, we’ve tailored our recruiting efforts to appeal to North Texans. In order to effectively do this, a majority of our student ambassadors have graduated from North Texas high schools. This allows for a common bond to develop while common misconceptions are addressed and concerns allayed. Mentioning this common bond the ambassadors and high school students share helps our ambassadors gain the trust of the prospect. The prospect can now get a glimpse of what someone—from a background not too different from his own— has become with the aid of UTA. Now that the prospective student has formed a relationship with a peer, the ambassador has a chance to address issues that are probably on the student’s mind. Our ambassadors also succeed in recruiting efforts, because they try listening rather than preaching. We can give them all the information we have, but we will never know if the information we are pushing is of any interest to a particular prospective student, unless we find out their interests. The ambassadors tend to spend a large amount of time at the introduction of a conversation finding out what the student cares about, and then catering presentations to that individual student. Such personal attention, not only allows the student to feel as if he’s more than a number to us, but also gets him the information he needs to make an informed decision. Our ambassadors are willing to take the time to research a question or point a student has and get back to that student personally. Often our ambassadors have P ge 14559.3 taken it upon themselves to learn about what jobs are available to students looking to break into video game design, for example, and educational requirements students need to attain to be successful in that industry. The ambassadors are then able to inform the students of the facts about the industry and decipher exactly what the student wants to do within the field. At least four of our ambassadors are not only of minority descent but are also female. This fact enables us to make a strong, though unspoken, point to families who are concerned about racial issues. Historically, minorities and women have been seen has inferior and incapable of being of any value in the engineering community. Yet our female minority student ambassadors have risen above this stigma and proven that women of color can not only go to college, but can succeed in a field that has a low percentage of minorities and gain successful employment. When parents and prospective students see that we not only recruit and educate such individuals, but we help mold them into individuals that are deserving of respect and are exceptional representatives of our school, they are encouraged.” As the preceding section shows, the engineering student ambassadors do more than just show up at an event and talk. They take on the role of mentoring for the high school students who are trying to make decisions about what path to take after high school. To do this effectively, the peer recruiters speak from their own experiences and from the experiences of their group to reach to prospective students. The student ambassadors also bring back questions to the group from their audience, research answers, share them with their peer recruiter colleagues, and then take this knowledge with them to future events. The benefits of using engineering peer recruiters is that high school students relate differently to students near their age (peers) than they do to older faculty or staff members. Peers can more nearly address the students concerns. Another benefit for prospective students is that they can ask about non-classroom issues and get answers from these current students about things like the whether they will really get a job and what college life is like. UT Arlington Engineering also benefits tremendously because the peer recruiters extend our reach beyond what the staff recruiter can do himself. In order to develop relationships with teachers and schools, the recruiter typically schedules a minimum of two visits a year to interested high schools. With the peer recruiters, we are able to extend both in duration and frequency the number of times that UTA Engineering can come interact with students at that school. We are also able to attend college nights and other events for pre-college students. The structure of the engineering peer recruiter/student ambassador program at UT Arlington is to hire current undergraduate engineering students for 10 hours a week for one per semester commitments which are renewable for each long semester (Fall and Spring).. We have been fortunate to have up to two peer recruiters per undergraduate engineering department in the past year which gave us a total of 10 student ambassadors per semester. The compensation for the student ambassadors is $500 per month or approximately $12.50 per hour. Peer recruiters must have their own transportation and are expected to get to and from their high school visits and other events on their own and to participate in some weekend events as needed. The peer P ge 14559.4 recruiters’ work schedules are arranged with the staff recruiter around the student’s classes for that semester. Peer recruiters report to the College of Engineering staff recruiter who in turn reports to the Assistant Dean for Student Affairs. Training for peer recruiters is a mix of formal training and “job-shadowing” to learn the tasks. The formal training includes internal UTA training about communication skills,