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Session 1338

Profile of Students Who Enroll in a Technical Graphics Program

Alice Y. Scales North Carolina State University

Abstract

For several years the Graphic Communications Program at North Carolina State University has enrolled students into an informal major through the Technology Education Program. Because the major is now in the process of being formalized, determining the needs of the students has become a priority. With this information, course offerings can be tailored more closely to the needs of the students. Along with the needs of industry, a profile of the students who enroll in a program helps it to recruit and retain students.

This paper will provide a summary of the profiles of students enrolled in the Graphic Communications Major under the Technology Education Program and the students in the Graphic Communications Minor. Likewise, it will discuss the value of knowing the characteristics of its students and how their profiles can be used to provide a closer match in course content, offerings, and instructional strategies in a program of this type.

Introduction

The Graphic Communications Program (GC) at North Carolina State University (NCSU) is in the process of creating a specialization under the Technology Education Program (TED). The program has used the TED Non-Teaching Option for some time to provide students with a degree similar to the one that is being planned. To develop this new specialization, knowledge of the characteristics and concerns of the students with an interest in this type of degree is important. The students, as the customers of this degree, must be taken into consideration. A program in any institution of higher education must also sell itself to potential customers. To ignore this aspect of creating a degree could doom the degree to failure. To obtain some of this information, a descriptive study was conducted in the form of a survey given to students who are in the TED Non-Teaching Option majoring or minoring in GC. This paper will report on the findings of this survey as well as discuss their implications for developing a major in the field and advertising it to potential students.

The Graphic Communications Program

The current Graphic Communications Program at NCSU offers 14 courses, three introductory engineering graphics courses and 9 advanced courses. The three introductory courses include a course for the general college population, a course for Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and a course for Industrial Engineering. The advanced courses include content related to advance

Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education

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Scales, A. (2003, June), Profile Of Students Who Enroll In A Technical Graphics Program Paper presented at 2003 Annual Conference, Nashville, Tennessee. 10.18260/1-2--11946