This research paper describes the entrepreneurial experiences of biomedical engineering (BME) undergraduate students participating in a summer research program. The field of BME requires advanced knowledge and skills across disciplines to keep up with rapid societal innovation. Research has investigated the importance of having an entrepreneurial mindset (EM) as a crucial part of a biomedical engineer's success, including their ability to make interdisciplinary connections, and understand the needs of others. EM is commonly implemented into undergraduate curricular settings, but EM can also be developed through undergraduate research settings, where students get hands-on experience with the research process through mentorship, laboratory skills, and data analysis. With support from the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), we developed a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program focused on BME student EM development. As part of the program, a subset of students are partnered with university-affiliated BME companies as summer research interns, where they gain research experience in an industry setting. These students were called entrepreneurial REU (eREU) fellows. EM was incorporated into professional development sessions built into the programs that all students attended: 8 eREU and 43 traditional REU fellows across three institutions. Both traditional REU and eREU students were asked to complete a pre- and post-program survey, including the Engineering Student Entrepreneurial Mindset Assessment (ESEMA) survey, which has associated validity evidence. These surveys asked students to provide insight into their program experiences and those experiences' impact on students' future plans. We quantitatively analyzed the pre- and post-data using independent samples t-tests, where we determined that students tend to show statistically significant increases in many areas, including confidence in skills such as research design and laboratory expertise. When analyzing our results by institution, we found that students at institutions with an eREU program rated themselves statistically significantly higher in areas such as confidence in the ability to work in industry, conduct cutting-edge research, and contribute to the research field. Students in programs with eREU fellows were also overall more interested in their work. In addition to evaluating scale items, we analyzed students' open-ended responses to multiple survey questions, where we showed that the eREU and REU programs allowed students to solidify their post-graduate plans that generally consisted of seeking higher education, pursuing careers in research, and entering the field of medicine. Students reported having an overall positive experience with particular positive associations with the support they received from mentors and fellow students. This study identifies the successes and setbacks of an eREU program designed to facilitate the development of EM in BME students. Based on the results of this study, we look forward to future iterations of this program that can give more students the opportunity to participate in the programming, reach out to more institutions, and continue to encourage BME-EM development. We expect that these results will provide insight into how BME students feel about their research experiences and how it contributes to their development of EM. This will allow for the identification of areas of further improvement to EM interventions in BME research contexts.

Engineering graduates have significant opportuni-ties for meaningful careers and social mobility, yet there needs to be more support for financially disadvantaged, academically gifted students. To improve these circumstances, we have intro-duced the Engineering Persistence project, an NSF -funded S-STEM scholarship program, at Rowan University. This project provides a group of students, selected by financial need and academic talent, with scholarships up to 10,000 USD per year, depending on financial need. In addition to these scholarships, we integrated a support system that includes interventions to support first- year engineering students' social and professional growth in their degree plans. We include in this paper the data collection and analysis process for the first year of this project, including the administration of the pre-survey, and the exploratory factor analysis conducted on the resulting data. This work in progress research paper aims to validate an instrument to assess the impact of an integrated support system on students' persistence in Rowan's engineering students.

The following full research paper explores the social networks (friends, family, faculty, etc.) of engineering students with disabilities. Engineers are tasked with designing solutions for a diverse world, and yet the engineering workforce is disproportionately made up of white, able-bodied men. As such, a persistent challenge in engineering education is not only to attract marginalized students to engineering, but to ensure their degree completion and persistence in the workforce. One predictor of persistence in engineering is the development of an engineering professional identity: a measure of interest, belonging, and competence in engineering as a subject. Those with a stronger engineering professional identity tend to have longer careers in engineering. While using engineering identity to predict success is common, the factors affecting the development of engineering identity are still being analyzed and characterized. Previous studies suggest that robust social support networks can reinforce a sense of belonging in engineering, particularly for marginalized engineering students. The following work uses pilot data to characterize effective social networks of engineering students with disabilities by responding to the following research questions: (1) What is the strength and direction of the relationship between social network homophily and disabled engineering students' sense of belonging?, and (2) What is the strength and direction of the relationship between social network capital and disabled engineering students' sense of belonging? Participants from a mid-sized, MidAtlantic university completed a validated instrument measuring engineering identity. They were then asked to provide names or initials of up to ten people they consider their closest acquaintances-friends, family, professors, advisors, coworkers, or any other relationship the student considers their “supporters”. The participants additionally noted their relationship to each supporter, what form this support takes, whether or not this supporter is an engineer, whether or not this supporter has a disability, and the relationships between the supporters listed. From this information, the researchers constructed social networks for each participant and used social network analysis measures to characterize each individual's network of supporters. These measures included homophily (measure of similarity between people in the network) and social capital (measure of resources available to members of the network through their connections). Results indicate that engineering homophily (the percentage of the student's network also involved in engineering) was positively correlated to feelings of belonging, while the use of emotional support was negatively correlated to feelings of belonging.

This Full Research paper uses resource network analysis to explore what resources faculty use when they make changes to their pedagogy, and how an engineering education “guild” is situated among those resources. The process of influencing pedagogical change can be understood as lying along a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum is the dissemination model, where research is simply made available and instructors are expected to seek out new tools. On the other end is the propagation model, where researchers, developers, and instructors work as one cohesive team to get innovative tools into classrooms. While each of these models and the instructor resources associated with them have been separately studied and defined, approaches on the spectrum between them remain understudied. Engineering education guilds employ an approach that falls along the dissemination-propagation spectrum; they use both dissemination and propagation techniques to influence pedagogical changes. Despite lack of formal research on the subject, engineering education “guilds” have become an increasingly popular vehicle for pedagogical change in engineering education classrooms. One such engineering education guild is the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN), which is focused on integrating entrepreneurial mindset (EM) into engineering curricula. By constructing resource networks for educators who have been exposed to KEEN, we aim to understand the role of KEEN among the myriad resources used by engineering educators when they integrate EM-related content into their classrooms. Results suggest that engineering education guilds are central to the resource networks of faculty looking to innovate their pedagogy, with the most popular resources all falling under the guild's umbrella. These resources are also strongly interconnected, especially during the integration process. However, the resources networks of those who saw successful, complete, sustained adoption reached beyond the guild's umbrella, forging connections with a variety of other materials from different sources.