Full paper: Aligning First-Year Engineering Goals with Major Selection

This full paper explores the relationship between student intended major and their academic and career goals. Many Engineering programs in higher education feature a first-year or general engineering program where students are exposed to university education. Often, students enroll as a general engineering student and are tasked with exploring the different engineering disciplines both in and out of the classroom to determine which best aligns with their interests, aptitudes, and future career goals. A challenge in this process, both for students and educators, lies in asking the right questions that can provide clues as to which disciplines are best suited for a student. Students may have underdeveloped or inaccurate conceptualizations of the different engineering majors, harbor misconceptions about the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of the disciplines, or may not yet have meaningfully engaged in major exploration. In this work, we report on the alignment between students' academic and career goals with their prospective major choice. We pose the question "What trends exist in the alignment between first-year general engineering students' goal orientations and their anticipated engineering majors?". Our analysis explores several key correlaries of this research question, including: How are engineering career goals associated with engineering majors? What correlation patterns exist between students' career conceptualizations and choices of engineering major? To answer these questions, we administered a brief survey instrument to 144 students enrolled in two sections of the first semester of a one-year general engineering course sequence. The survey consisted of eight open-ended questions informed by engineering identity frameworks (Godwin, Tonso) and was administered in the fifth week of the semester. Our qualitative analysis began with an initial open coding pass using in-vivo methods, conducted in paired teams to enhance interrater reliability. After generating preliminary codes, we developed refined axial codes to ensure consistency across the dataset. Axial coding was applied at the question level, with individual researchers coding responses to specific questions. Following a second pass of axial coding, we developed a correlation matrix to identify broad trends in student responses. This study reports our findings on the relationships between students' career and academic goals and their choice of intended major. We identify broad trends among the 111 respondents with respect to their career aspirations. Furthermore, we observe several trends in students' conceptualizations of the general career characteristics of the field, suggesting patterns that may inform future approaches to major selection guidance.