Graduate Engineering Programs: Admission, Success, Support and Institutional Culture

This study examined the experience of students within Canadian graduate engineering programs and explored how institutional culture impacted access to these programs and student support resources.The paper discusses how admission processes, institutional culture and support resources impact women within graduate engineering programs and presents recommendations to potentially widen student access and support student success.As part of a mixed methods study, 10 faculty and 20 students were interviewed at two large Canadian graduate engineering schools to gather data on participants' perceptions of admission processes, institutional culture and support resources.Equal numbers of women and men were interviewed to determine if gendered experiences or perceptions of the culture were experienced and all interview data was anonymized to protect the identity of participants.Findings indicate that informal practices, containing unspoken rules, ran parallel to formal admission processes; certain experiences of institutional culture were gendered, particularly around notions of success; and support systems were often lacking or insensitive to the needs of graduate students.Participants offered a number of suggestions to improve support systems.This paper increases our knowledge regarding Canadian graduate engineering schools by identifying realities parallel to formal admission practices, describing institutional culture, and analyzing graduate students' perception of support systems.It concludes that informal admission practices should be acknowledged to widen access, that institutional cultural change regarding DEI is problematic and support resources could be improved to better serve all graduate students, particularly women and other under-represented groups.