Influences on the development of students' professional identity as an engineer

Understanding how an engineering student develops their professional identity as an engineer offers a way of improving engineering education. This paper explores the experiences of some recent graduates and their employers. Initial results presented point to a few major influences on the development of a student's identity as a professional identity including industry experience during their degree (particularly longer term co-op placements), their cohort including the support they received from it, and large contextual projects conducted in their coursework. Further, this research aims to ask different questions, both in terms of what is investigated as well as how.