Using a career conference to promote advising in the freshman curriculum

Our data shows that over the past 15 years over 75% of the entering first year students change their selected major between the start of classes in August and the time they need to register for the second year classes in March. This movement of students has many impacts on student retention and on students´ success across 4 years of engineering education. To help improve the retention of engineering students in the freshman year - thus positively impacting students´ ongoing success - we created a number of writing assignments in the first year Introduction to Engineering course to combat facilitate students´ choosing their majors wisely during or immediately after the freshman year. These writing assignments were designed to engage students in researching various crucial aspects of the field of engineering in which they were interested. Despite our efforts to have students research and write about various aspects of a particular engineering field, many of the students just did not take the assignments seriously; as a result they did not get the full benefit of the assignment. To encourage the students to put more effort into the assignments, we created the Freshman Career Conference. The conference is a Saturday event, modeled after career-oriented events and conferences held at student professional conferences and conventions held by organizations such as the Society of Women Engineers, National Society of Black Engineers and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. For our Freshman Career Conference, we brought in practicing engineers from Pennsylvania corporations; these engineers talked to students about their education and their work; gave professional development workshops; and spoke to students and students about the importance of beginning their career development plans now as freshman. This paper discusses the factors around creating such a conference and the impact it has made.