Inviting Industry Guest Speakers to Improve Undergraduate Student Understanding of Career Options

This research full paper describes the impact that diverse industry and career speakers can have on undergraduate student's career perspectives in bioengineering. The career prospects for bioengineering (BE) students can be confusing, with a diverse range of opportunities and job descriptions that do not clearly illustrate the daily experiences of the engineers. Often, graduating students are unaware of what a professional engineer does in the field and how what they have learned and experienced in school will be applied to their work. To provide students with a clearer understanding of the possible roles and responsibilities they would have in careers, we invited a variety of engineering professionals (e.g., from Abbott, Stellantis, Tech Startups, Teijin, Exon, Graduate School) as guest speakers to an upper-level undergraduate biomaterials course for mechanical engineering (ME), bioengineering, and dual majors. This course element was designed to allow students to hear about various companies, positions, and daily activities from multiple sources and ask questions that were pertinent to them and their career interests. To assess what students perceived as valuable from their interactions with the guest speakers, students were asked to submit questionnaires at the beginning of the semester, after each career presentation, and in end of semester evaluations. In these surveys, students responded to open-ended questions about the usefulness of the career talks, what they took away from the presentations, as well as a self-report of the impact of the talks on their career outlook. Survey responses were inductively coded to explore how students' interactions with guest speakers impacted 1) how they will apply for jobs, 2) what out-of-class experiences might be valuable for students' future career search endeavors, and 3) what roles and responsibilities students might value in a future career. Results of this paper will detail findings within those three themes and provide suggestions for how guest speakers can improve students' understanding and subsequent pursuit of career opportunities in BE and ME.