Interdisciplinary and Professional Development Outside of the Classroom

The need to solve 21st century problems has driven higher education institutions to change how they educate engineers. Interdisciplinary (ID) curricular and co-curricular programs have shown promise for developing professional skills in students that prepare them to solve 21st century problems; however, there is still much to be understood about how these programs prepare students to succeed in the current workforce. This project proposes a longitudinal, qualitative study to deeply examine ID student development through two programs outside of the classroom (co-curriculars), specifically seeking to identify features of the experience that promote ID development and examining how ID development relates to biomedical engineering career preparedness. This study has potential to provide insights into previously unexamined features of co-curricular environments that develop students' ID competence, as well as critically examines the assumption that ID development prepares students for a professional engineering workplace.