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For the past three years, UCF-CECS has tracked engineering
professionals for purposes of better understanding what decisions
they made during their early education, during their college
education and on into the workplace. This information has been very
useful in helping to plan pre-college engineering events such as the
Engineers Future Forum. This is
the first year the Office of Educational Partnerships
has extended the survey to include pre-college students to determine
their interest in pursuing engineering as a career. 200+ ninth
through eleventh grade students at Lyman and Edgewater High Schools
were the first group to participate. Their information was used to
compare with ASME engineers who participated in the Why Engineering
Survey. The results were presented to the students during each forum
to demonstrate similarities between their responses and practicing
engineers' responses. Their information was also used for the two
Forum's general question/answer sessions and to determine which
speakers should be recruited for the two events. 72% of the students
who attended the forums found the comparison to be very useful and
26% found it to be somewhat useful. One of the engineer speakers
remarked, "It gave the students a good idea how their perception of
the engineering field matched up to those of real engineers."
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