The Engineering Education Experiences of Students Serving in the Reserves or National Guard
- Conference
- Location
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Virtual On line
- Publication Date
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June 22, 2020
- Start Date
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June 22, 2020
- End Date
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June 26, 2021
- Conference Session
- Tagged Division
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Military and Veterans
- Tagged Topic
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Diversity
- Page Count
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17
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--35316
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/35316
- Download Count
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627
Paper Authors
Catherine Mobley Clemson University
Catherine Mobley, Ph.D., is a Professor of Sociology at Clemson University. She has over 30 years experience in project and program evaluation and has worked for a variety of consulting firms, non-profit agencies, and government organizations, including the Rand Corporation, the American Association of Retired Persons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. Since 2004, she been a member of the NSF-funded MIDFIELD research project on engineering education; she has served as a Co-PI on three research projects, including one on transfer students and another on student veterans in engineering.
Joseph Murphy University of California, Los Angeles
Joseph Murphy is a graduate student of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles whose research interests include the mobilization of college knowledge, and the role of institutional agents in promoting college access to STEM programs. He received a B.S. in Sociology from Clemson University.
Joyce B. Main
Purdue University, West Lafayette
orcid.org/0000-0002-3984-533X
Joyce B. Main is Associate Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University. She received an Ed.M. in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a Ph.D. degree in Learning, Teaching, and Social Policy from Cornell University. Dr. Main examines student academic pathways and transitions to the workforce in science and engineering. She was a recipient of the 2014 American Society for Engineering Education Educational Research and Methods Division Apprentice Faculty Award, the 2015 Frontiers in Education Faculty Fellow Award, and the 2019 Betty Vetter Award for Research from WEPAN. In 2017, Dr. Main received a National Science Foundation CAREER award to examine the longitudinal career pathways of engineering PhDs.
Catherine E. Brawner Research Triangle Educational Consultants
Catherine E. Brawner is President of Research Triangle Educational Consultants. She received her Ph.D.in Educational Research and Policy Analysis from NC State University in 1996. She also has an MBA from Indiana University (Bloomington) and a bachelor’s degree from Duke University. She specializes in
evaluation and research in engineering education, computer science education, and technology education. Dr. Brawner is a founding member and former treasurer of Research Triangle Park Evaluators, an American Evaluation Association affiliate organization and is a member of the American Educational Research Association and American Evaluation Association, in addition to ASEE. Dr. Brawner is also an Extension Services Consultant for the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) and, in that role, advises computer science and engineering departments on diversifying their undergraduate student population. She remains an active researcher, including studying academic policies, gender and ethnicity issues, transfers, and matriculation models with MIDFIELD as well as student veterans in engineering. Her evaluation work includes evaluating teamwork models, broadening participation initiatives, and S-STEM and LSAMP programs.
Susan M. Lord University of San Diego
Susan M. Lord received a B.S. from Cornell University in Materials Science and Electrical Engineering (EE) and the M.S. and Ph.D. in EE from Stanford University. She is currently Professor and Chair of Integrated Engineering at the University of San Diego. Her research focuses on the study and promotion of diversity in engineering including student pathways and inclusive teaching. She is Co-Director of the National Effective Teaching Institute (NETI). Her research has been sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Lord is among the first to study Latinos in engineering and coauthored The Borderlands of Education: Latinas in Engineering. Dr. Lord is a Fellow of the IEEE and ASEE and is active in the engineering education community including serving as General Co-Chair of the Frontiers in Education Conference, President of the IEEE Education Society, and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Education (ToE) and the Journal of Engineering Education (JEE). She and her coauthors received the 2011 Wickenden Award for the best paper in JEE and the 2011 and 2015 Best Paper Awards for the IEEE ToE. In Spring 2012, Dr. Lord spent a sabbatical at Southeast University in Nanjing, China teaching and doing research. She is on the USD team implementing “Developing Changemaking Engineers”, an NSF-sponsored Revolutionizing Engineering Education (RED) project. Dr. Lord is the 2018 recipient of the IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award.
Abstract
Much of the research on military-connected students focuses on former members of the military (i.e., “student veterans”), or those individuals who served in the military (i.e., were a part of the “active component” or AC), then exited the military and moved on to pursue their college degrees. These students’ educational experiences are often conflated with the experiences of those students who serve in the military while attending college (i.e., those students who are serving in the National Guard or in the Reserves, or the “Reserve Corps”). This results in an inadequate understanding of the experiences of Reserve Corps (RC) students in engineering education.
In this paper, we focus on students who are actively serving in the RC, either in the Reserves or National Guard, while pursuing their engineering degrees (i.e., Reserve and National Guard Engineering (RANGE) students). These RANGE students have unique challenges during their education, such as the need to attend regular training and being prepared to be called to active duty at any time. We examine RANGE students’ motivations for joining the military and engineering and the extent to which these students experience benefits as a result of their simultaneous military service and educational pursuits.
Our analysis reveals that RANGE students joined the military primarily to receive financial assistance although the timing of this realization and reasoning varied. In terms of benefits of their service, the RANGE students were able to make direct, real-time connections between their engineering studies and their military service. The results of our study will be of interest to engineering educators interested in broadening participation in engineering, supporting the students who are in engineering programs, and recognizing the assets that they bring.
Key Words: student veterans, Reserve Corps, National Guard, engineering education
Mobley, C., & Murphy, J., & Main, J. B., & Brawner, C. E., & Lord, S. M. (2020, June), The Engineering Education Experiences of Students Serving in the Reserves or National Guard Paper presented at 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual On line . 10.18260/1-2--35316
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