Engineering futures: Female students, careers, and work/life balance

The purpose of this research project was to examine the content of engineering students imagined futures. We asked 347 students from a large undergraduate engineering program to list ten salient events they imagined in their future, as well as to list the ages at which they wanted to realize those milestones. We also surveyed them about their learning strategies and motivation for engineering coursework. We developed a coding procedure to examine the types of events participants in the sample reported, and utilized a number of statistical techniques to examine the relationship between event type and classroom motivation and learning strategies, as well as to compare differences in event type between males and females. Our correlational results suggested that students who listed more professional engineering events were more likely to self-report adaptive learning strategies and motivation for their coursework. Further exploration of the data uncovered that women were more focused on short term academic events than males, and that their long term vision of the future was split between domestic events and professional events, which may have decreased how far their events extend into the future.