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.

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.

This work in progress research paper describes part of a project that aims to understand what qualifications BME industry employers prefer in the hiring process. An inductive content analysis of 95 job postings relevant to upper-level or soon-to-be graduated biomedical engineering (BME) bachelor's degree students was performed to explore patterns in responsibilities and qualifications within these postings. Results from this work indicate a high emphasis on employees' ability to apply technical documentation and communication skills in the job setting. Codes related to job qualifications indicate industry employers prefer employees with general professional skills that allow them to work in a team setting and solve problems. Additionally, we found that employers are often open to hiring BME majors in addition to multiple other engineering and life sciences majors for the positions listed in the postings in this targeted BME job search. In future work, the results of this content analysis will be used to inform the development of a set of archetypal BME student resumes that will be used in semi-structured interviews with BME industry hiring managers. The interviews seek to examine the alignment between what job postings indicate as important, what hiring managers articulate as important in hiring decisions, and what hiring managers view in resumes as representing those qualifications. The overarching goal of this work is to understand the landscape of BME industry hiring practices and increase alignment in the goals of industry, students, and educators. Results have the potential to inform how students engage with BME education, how they represent their experiences in application materials, and how educators structure BME curriculum.

This work-in-progress research paper focusses on comparing changes in students' learning outcomes in engineering design and entrepreneurship courses. Recent national calls to reform undergraduate engineering education has led to extensive research in the identification and development of effective instructional strategies. Project-based learning (PBL) is one instructional strategy that has received empirical and anecdotal support for its ability to instill professional skills in addition to technical content knowledge in engineering graduates. Engineering programs have increasingly adopted PBL in the form of capstone engineering design courses, entrepreneurship courses, and co-curricular experiences. However, PBL is broadly defined in the literature, and as such, these adaptations are often nuanced in their design, structure, and pedagogical approaches; and consequently, may have differing impact on student learning outcomes. Engineering design and entrepreneurship courses are two commonly used avenues in which engineering students are exposed to PBL. In design courses, students often work in teams to complete tasks that lead to devising an engineering solution to a given `real-world' problem. Most, if not all, engineering students gain exposure to PBL via capstone design courses that are often required in the engineering curriculum. In addition to design courses, entrepreneurship courses also expose engineering students to PBL by engaging them in entrepreneurial projects in which students work in teams, often conceptualizing and designing products. While the engineering design process is more focused on the outcome solution to the problem, entrepreneurship design processes tend to emphasize the front end of the design process, specifically opportunity identification and validation. Students engage in customer discovery and develop prototype solutions. Although nuanced, we hypothesize that due to these different approaches, engineering design and entrepreneurship will have varied impact on student learning outcomes. In our presented work, we investigate these differences by examining changes in students' perceived risk-taking abilities, creative self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial self-efficacy in engineering design and entrepreneurship practicum courses. Preliminary results show that entrepreneurial self-efficacy increases in both design and entrepreneurship courses. However, differences in the magnitude of change for its subconstructs are noted between the two courses. In contrast, increase in risk-taking and creative self-efficacy is only found in the entrepreneurship course and not in the engineering design course. Future work will focus on analyzing the pre-post survey data for statistically significant changes.