Chemical Engineering Major Selection Throughout the First Year: A Mixed-Methods Approach

摘要

For any student in the first year of an undergraduate program, there are an overwhelming number of decisions to make. One of the biggest of these is choosing what to study. This choice is influenced by many complex factors and is difficult to predict or fully understand. A better recognition of why a student opts into and stays in a major could yield a deeper understanding into how students choose a major and what they expect from engineering careers. This paper examines students who chose chemical engineering and completed a set of surveys administered during their first year of study. The surveys contained questions that were both quantitative and qualitative in nature. In total, 32 complete response sets were included in the analysis from students who answered all three surveys and chose chemical engineering as their major in any of the three surveys. These responses were selected to investigate the major selection path of students who opt in and stay in the chemical engineering program by the end of their first year.