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Environmentally Responsible Engineering in a New First-Year Engineering Experience

This full research paper explores two factors of increasing importance for first-year university engineering curricula: sustainability and diversity. Over the past fifteen years, many universities in the United States have adjusted their engineering programs in response to these two values expressed by industry, professional organizations, and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. This research study addresses these issues by integrating environmentally-responsible engineering (ERE) concepts into a series of courses in the pilot of a new first-year engineering experience.We surveyed students at the end of the experience to determine the impacts of integrating ERE into the course sequence on students’ enthusiasm for engineering, interest in ERE and ERE professions, concern for the environment, and sense of belonging. We found that students reported much greater satisfaction and positive impacts than we expected. Student responses suggest that incoming first-year engineering students are concerned about environmental issues and feel both responsible and inspired to use engineering skills to design solutions for problems impacting the environment and society. These results provide motivation to pursue further research on the effects of integrating sustainability concepts into engineering curricula on students’ motivation and consequential retention, especially among underrepresented students.