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Work in Progress: Leveraging Short, Curated Alumni Videos to Bridge the “Readiness Gap”

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Conference

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Portland, Oregon

Publication Date

June 23, 2024

Start Date

June 23, 2024

End Date

July 12, 2024

Conference Session

Wellness, Readiness, and Thriving

Tagged Division

Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division (LEES)

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/48503

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Paper Authors

biography

Harly Ramsey University of Southern California Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-3809-9312

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Harly Ramsey is an Associate Professor of Technical Communication Practice and the Associate Director of the Engineering in Society Program at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering. She holds a Ph.D. in English, and her training in narrative theory, cultural studies, and rhetoric informs her teaching and scholarship. Her current research investigates students' perspectives on their transition to the workforce; she also studies student metacognition and self-regulation. She developed and continues to work on Engineering Moment, a co-curricular podcast project about the social role of engineering, and Vision Venture, a video series exploring students’ engineering identities, agency, and purpose after graduation.

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biography

Stephanie Nicole Bartholomew University of Southern California

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Stephanie Bartholomew is a student at the University of Southern California, majoring in Chemical Engineering with a focus on Biological and Pharmaceutical applications. With a keen interest in the intersection of engineering and healthcare, she aspires to make a difference in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. Beyond academics, Stephanie is deeply involved in campus leadership, serving on the board of the Grand Challenges Scholars Program, where they spearhead initiatives to unite engineering students in addressing critical global issues. Additionally, she dedicates time to mentorship as a peer mentor for the Center for Engineering Diversity, offering guidance and support to new students navigating college life.

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Abstract

This Work-in-Progress paper discusses preliminary data from a study of undergraduate engineering students who viewed curated videos of alumni offering advice on early career engineering and perspectives on post-graduation life. The study intends to investigate whether the videos can improve students’ understanding of the realities of early career engineering and can promote their ability to visualize their future professional selves. The study includes a pre-survey, video viewing, a post-survey, and semi-structured interviews with some of the participants. This paper presents some data from the post-survey.

This paper focuses on the impact of the video series as a means of communication from the alumni speakers to the student viewers. The paper presents scholarship on the use of videos in education and other fields. As a medium, the video series can convey representational role modeling as it delivers content. Preliminary data from 121 participants suggest the videos’ content was impactful and that the visual nature of videos can prompt strong reactions among students. The distribution of student ratings for the most and the least meaningful videos suggests that certain topics resonate with students, but this data needs to be explored further in light of the students’ qualitative explanations for their selections and their demographic data. For instance, the video "Women in Engineering," ranked highly as a selection for both the most and least meaningful video. Students' ratings of the importance of speakers' perceived identities—including race, gender expression, socioeconomic background, and major within engineering— highlight the varying significance students placed on the qualities, and they will be analyzed further in future work. Overall, the preliminary data suggest that the curated video series resonates with students on multiple levels, including the meaningfulness of the alumni advice and the representation of the alumni themselves. The model of a curated video series is scalable and transferrable to other types of institutions and diverse student populations.

Ramsey, H., & Bartholomew, S. N. (2024, June), Work in Progress: Leveraging Short, Curated Alumni Videos to Bridge the “Readiness Gap” Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/48503

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