15th Annual First-Year Engineering Experience Conference (FYEE)
Boston, Massachusetts
July 28, 2024
July 28, 2024
July 30, 2024
8
10.18260/1-2--48585
https://peer.asee.org/48585
30
Dr. Li earned his master's degree in Chemical Engineering in 2009 from the Imperial College of London and his doctoral degree in 2020 from the University of Georgia, College of Engineering.
In this complete evidence-based practice, a new course framework is explained to help with first-year students’ professional development. A common practice of growing professional skill sets is to obtain internship opportunities as the industry is generally looking for applicants who are at intermediate or advanced levels. However, the first-year students generally would have few solid technical skills. Therefore, the research question is: how to help first-year students in gaining essential skills before they apply for the internships and become future workforce. In a large private university, the first-year students are allowed to participate in Vertically-integrated Projects (VIPs). The VIPs are multi-year cross-disciplinary projects that enable students to be part of the research projects. It opens entry level opportunities for first-year students to work with senior peers and directly with professors. It is a learning platform for students to build professional skills via peer learning and active learning activities. The peer learning activities include group project events. A group leader is assigned to each group activity. His or her role is to monitor and ensure the students document research progress in their engineering notebook. The peers' support enables a smoother knowledge transfer and sharing of information. On the other hand, active learning experiences involve structured team presentations and faculty feedback on the presentation. Faculty would also schedule project discussion hours with the students and ensure guide the group discussions. Also, Faculty would take individual students to different research labs for an immersive research experience.
Constructivism is the theory that states that learners could construct knowledge rather than passively absorbing information from the educators. As people experience the world and reflect on those experiences, they construct their own representations and incorporate new information into their pre-existing knowledge. The VIP students could construct their personalized knowledge base or skill sets from the resources such as flexible enrollment, hybrid project schedule and adjustable topic of interests.
The first-year students have the option to take 0 or 1 credit for VIPs. Moreover, the VIPs’ group activities could be in a hybrid format, combining in-person students on campus with remote students from different campuses, even different universities, so students have the flexibility of planning their academic schedules with their personal development. The VIP team also allows students to pick their interesting topics to pursue and they are allowed to change the topic of interest every semester.
During the 2-year VIP operation, many first-year students have received benefits of being part of an active community. The VIP is designed to be differentiated from student clubs and research labs. VIPs have project deadlines as it is an undergraduate course, compared with the student clubs. However, there is no time limit to publish the work, compared with the research labs. This unique opportunity would allow students to fully explore their skill sets according to their own career pathways. By the end of the VIP course, the faculty could introduce them to the industrial collaborations as well as university research labs once they become competent in the fields of their interests. In this paper, a detailed pathway is provided and student feedback is also considered.
Li, R. (2024, July), Applying Vertically-integrated Project as a Sustainable Pathway for First-year Student Professional Development Paper presented at 15th Annual First-Year Engineering Experience Conference (FYEE), Boston, Massachusetts. 10.18260/1-2--48585
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