Many engineering students feel underprepared when going into the workforce, due to a lack of real-world application in the college curriculum and the necessary skills to confidently make decisions. Consequently, the transition between college and the first job can be rough for many graduates. This causes many to seek jobs outside of the engineering field altogether. According to a study, only one-third of engineering graduates seek jobs in an engineering field.

To combat this issue, the authors propose the incorporation of a multi-disciplinary project experience that involves skills used in business, art, environmental science, and engineering into the standard curriculum for engineering students.     

In the present study, participants completed a five-week project experience that incorporated aspects of an entrepreneurial mindset (EM), bio-inspired design, and the arts. The project aimed to give students the opportunity to work on an open-ended engineering problem in which they not only design the lightest weight prosthetic arm using MatLab coding, but also tackle the project from an EM, arts, and bio-inspiration aspects. At the conclusion of the project, participant responses to photovoice reflection prompts were collected. The following sections of this study document the authors’ perceptions of the student responses.

The collective efforts of the authors respond to the following research question:

Q1. What are the students’ perceptions of participating in a multi-disciplinary project experience that involves EM, arts, and bio-inspired design?

This project was assigned, to groups of 2, in week 5 of the Winter quarter. All students enrolled in this class have completed Statics I and an Intro to MatLab courses.