internal consistency was determined for eachquestionnaire (Cronbach's alpha = 0.77–0.85) and reflected good validity; therefore, nofurther changes were made before the questionnaires' broader distribution.2.3 Statistical analysis After collecting data from the returned responses, the Statistical Package for theSocial Sciences (SPSS) (version 23) was used for analysis. The results are presented aspercentages, means, standard deviations, and frequencies.2.4 Results The following sections show the study results of the courses' importance as evaluatedfrom the academic and non-academic perspective. Participants in the questionnaires ratedwater courses in terms of importance on a 5-point Likert scale (5 is important, 1 is
the challenging time of the pandemic and/or the program being held entirelyvirtually, or whether we would have experienced the same faltering engagement if this programwere running in a typical in-person, non-pandemic academic setting.An additional challenge we are facing is a lack of diversity in our mentorship pool, across gender(just two of the mentors in the ISMP TEAM group are women) and engineering discipline, as wellas an underrepresentation of black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) program participants.This lack of diversity is similarly reflected in the SMSE advisory board and alumni pools fromwhich the program mentors were selected, and is a critical challenge that the SMSE is working toaddress. That said, the students
there appears to be a small positive gaintowards graduation moving the line above average readiness. Additional connection wasobserved when RQ1b was explored. As Table 3 reflects, there appears to be a strong correlation(ρ = 0.913, p = 0.087) between the mean readiness response and the number of professionalexperiences a student has. A t-test was used to compare overall (mean) readiness of the students who had no professional experiences to the group of students who had one or more experiences(p = 0.236, t = 1.189, df = 280).RQ1c explored “Does the self-reported level of the practice readiness differ across variousprofessional experiences? Which experience is the most impactful?” A total of 498 experienceswere