Research Student Project

Supervisor name & contact details:

Una Beagon

Assistant Head of School

School of Civil & Structural Engineering una.beagon@tudublin.ie

Research Centre Name and Website

This project will be undertaken as part of the CREATE research group. The overarching goal of CREATE is to foster a community of STEM education research, in particular we aim to nurture and support excellence in STEM education research. https://sites.google.com/a/dit.ie/create/home

Please indicate if the intention is to transfer from the Masters programme to the PhD programme (if applicable)

MPhil and PhD opportunities available

Funding Arrangements

Self-Funded (Scholarship not available. Fees & Materials to be paid by the student. Materials costs not significant)

Funding Agency

N/A

Funding Details

N/A

Subject Area

Engineering Education Research STEM Research

Diversity in Education

Gender Studies

Title of the Project

The Impact of the First Year Experience on Female Engineering students

Project Description (max 300 words)

Project Ireland 2040 outlines a National Development Plan which commits €116 billion to an ambitious programme of infrastructure development works over the next ten years. Infrastructure projects will be delivered by engineers, yet there is a significant shortage of engineers in Ireland with engineering organisations indicating a shortfall of 5000 engineers in Ireland in 2020 (EI, 2020).

One opportunity to address this shortage is to fix the “leaky pipeline” a term used to describe when female engineers drop out of the profession.

The originality of this project is to focus specifically on the first year experience as it relates to female engineering students: to better understand their experiences with regard to the following research questions:

· What has been their experiences of being in an engineering classroom?

· What has been their experiences of different teaching pedagogies?

· How has their background influenced their experience in first year engineering?

· To what degree have lecturing staff helped support their first year experience and how?

· What challenges have first year female engineering students faced and how have they dealt with them?

Research work is likely to include surveys or focus groups and in depth interviews with first year engineering students in Irish Universities.

The outcomes will be used to identify barriers and opportunities for academic staff to enhance the first year experience of female engineering students with a view to increasing retention of female engineering students and hence plugging the “Leaky pipeline”.

Student requirements for this project

Minimum of a 2.1 honours degree.

Deadline to submit applications (only for funded projects)

If you are interested in submitting an application for this project, please complete an Expression of Interest and email it to phd@dit.ie.