An investigation of first year students' perceptions of global awareness

Most engineering educators recognize the importance of emphasizing the so-called "soft-skills" in the undergraduate curriculum in order for graduates to be competitive in the global workforce. Of increasing interest for many engineering programs is engaging students in educational experiences that will increase their global awareness, cultural understanding, and cultural sensitivity. For many universities, requiring all students to work or study internationally is not an option due to the high financial cost. Therefore, other methods must be used to engage students in international experiences without requiring international travel. In order to inform planning related to non-travel based international experiences, data was collected from 435 first-year engineering students from all campuses of Penn State University. Survey questions asked students about their perceptions of global awareness, including a self-assessment of their current awareness, their desire to improve their global awareness, and how they anticipated improving global awareness while an undergraduate. The results indicated that approximately one-third of the freshmen felt that global awareness was very important to them personally while over one-half believed global awareness to be very important to them professionally. Over half of the students hoped to greatly improve their global awareness during their undergraduate career. When asked how students anticipated increasing their global awareness, the most frequently endorsed responses included interacting with international students in and out of the classroom, completing assignments that focused on international issues, and studying abroad. Penn State University has begun to take steps to provide students with non-travel based international experiences to help students' meet the needs of the global workforce. One example of such experiences is the use of cross-national engineering student teams at the capstone level.