Investigating Engineering Culture During COVID-19

Research on engineering culture often aims, either explicitly or implicitly, to understand why engineering in the U.S. remains largely white and largely male. However, while increasing diversity in engineering has been a major focus in the U.S. for decades, the percentages for women and people of color have stayed relatively stagnant. Recently, however, the COVID-19 pandemic caused rapid changes in education and exacerbated challenges around diversity and inclusion in engineering. It also provides a unique opportunity to investigate engineering culture during a time of crisis to examine possibilities for cultural change from a new lens. To that end, this study investigates three U.S. mechanical engineering student's perspective on their department's response to COVID-19 in order to understand the extent to which various dimensions of engineering culture [1] impacted the response. This study aims to understand how students' reported experiences map onto the dimensions of engineering culture as well as to assess the fit of the theoretical framework and inform codebook development for a larger research study.