Engineering for Self or Society? How Undergraduate Engineers Learn to Value Research

• In Event: Sustainability & Transformation in Engineering Education - I: Overcoming Disjunctures in the Cultivation of Professional Skill Sets

Abstract

Engineering has the potential for powerful social good. This message is broadcast loudly at national and institutional levels in the United States, as leaders in government, industry, and academia tout the importance of technological research and design. What then does this message look like for undergraduate students studying engineering? Based on an ethnographic study of four academic engineering research groups that include undergraduates, this paper analyzes how the visions of social benefit that principal investigators, university leaders, and funding bodies promote trickle down—or don’t—to the students who do the everyday experimental work of pursuing those visions. Research groups are a crucial site of tacit and explicit socialization for potential future engineers, yet undergraduate researchers tend to struggle to articulate how their work contributes to a project’s lofty social goals. This paper argues that certain social contexts and norms in research groups encourage or discourage undergraduates to embrace and prioritize the social benefits of their work. These two approaches reflect underlying epistemic cultures that preferentially value personal professional development, group success, and the technical challenge and elegance of micro tasks or the socially beneficial big-picture visions for audiences outside the laboratory. Engineering education strives to interrupt this dichotomy, such as through coursework and activities focused on real-world sociotechnical problems, such as those inspired by the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Challenges initiative, hackathons, design competitions, etc. Yet a disengagement from society persists in the everyday conversations, priorities, and spaces of engineering research.

Author

• Caitlin Donahue Wylie, University of Virginia