She is focused on developing, teaching and assessing upper-level Biomedical Engineering laboratory courses, with particular interest in improving student technical communication skills.

He holds a B.S. in industrial engineering from the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez, and a M.S. and PhD in biomedical engineering from The Ohio State University. His current position entails teaching measurements and instrumentation courses, leading micro and nano educational labs, as well as mentoring students in their senior capstone projects. His current projects include industry integration in the curriculum, undergraduate professional development, and entrepreneurial minded learning in the classroom. Amena Shermadou, Ohio State University Amena Shermadou is an Engineering Education graduate student at The Ohio State University. She received her Bachelors and Masters in Biomedical Engineering from Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio. Her experience with teaching first-year engineering students has led to research interests in curriculum development, student empowerment and the development of holistic engineers through the collaboration with engineering stakeholders.

He holds a B.S. in industrial engineering from the University of Puerto Rico Mayagüez, and a M.S. and PhD in biomedical engineering from The Ohio State University. His current position entails teaching measurements and instrumentation courses, leading micro and nano educational labs, as well as mentoring students in their senior capstone projects. His current projects include industry integration in the curriculum, undergraduate professional development, and entrepreneurial minded learning in the classroom.

Evidence shows that biomedical engineering students face unique challenges in entering the workforce compared to peers in other engineering majors. The purpose of this study is to explore the factors impacting undergraduate engineering students’ career attainment, or the acquisition of employment in a chosen field, and how the students experienced these factors in their pathways towards post-graduate employment. By studying differences in processes towards career attainment, there is an opportunity to promote equity and better support the inclusion and persistence of women and racially minoritized groups in engineering, particularly their readiness to enter the engineering workforce. We sought to answer two research questions: (RQ1) What contextual factors are identified by engineering students as supports and barriers to their attainment of a career in the engineering field? (RQ2) How are engineering students experiencing inequities in their processes toward career attainment? We conducted six focus groups with undergraduate engineering students at a large Midwestern University. Participants were purposefully sampled based on demographics from four engineering disciplines: biomedical engineering and the three preferred majors for students transferring out of biomedical engineering at our university, chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, and mechanical engineering. We used social cognitive career theory (SCCT) to inform our data collection and analysis and interpret the findings. The transcripts were analyzed by developing a codebook containing theory-driven codes from SCCT and emergent codes from the data. We identified five themes representing the contextual factors impacting engineering students’ processes toward career attainment: implications of (1) interpersonal relationships; (2) institutional infrastructure; (3) academics; (4) social identity; and (5) out-of-class experiences. We also found that these contextual factors may act as either a support or barrier depending on personal factors such as demographics, personality, or identity. The nuance revealed in this study, that a contextual factor may be both a support and barrier, presents implications for universities to provide more individualized career preparedness resources and recognize the ways that students’ positionalities impact their processes toward career attainment.