Page 26.631.3 Accreditation is one of the most distinctive features of and influential processes inundergraduate engineering education. As the ABET website describes it, “accreditation is proofthat a collegiate program has met certain standards necessary to produce [emphasis added]graduates who are ready to enter their professions. Students who graduate from accreditedprograms have access to enhanced opportunities in employment; licensure, registration andcertification; graduate education and global mobility.”8 A sympathetic reading of this descriptiontakes accreditation to be a process of quality control achieved through the
educational opportunities into the curriculum through capstone design courses, realistic case studies facilitated by professional engineers, mentorship experiences, and interviews with engineering leaders across the career trajectory. Each of these activities can be used to help engineering students value and develop organizational skills before they secure their first job. 4) While the relatively recent introduction of accreditation bodies (ABET, CEAB) to engineering education may feel like a constraint to many professors, the graduate attributes generated by these bodies can be used creatively as a pedagogical framework. When used as a regulatory checklist, the
leadership learning opportunities and experiencesof undergraduate engineering students as a whole. Our study fills this gap by examining how1203 undergraduate engineering students at a large, Canadian, research-intensive university haveused non-formal learning spaces—co-curricular and extra-curricular activities—to hone theirleadership and engineering skills and identities. Our quantitative analysis of survey resultssuggests that explicit leadership programing, student government and industry-basedprofessional development activities were most effective at helping engineering students developtheir leadership skills. When it came to catalyzing their engineering skills development, wefound that internships, design competitions and professional