Decades of Alumni: Designing a Study on the Long-Term Impact of Design Education

Design is an essential part of engineering practice and engineering education. As such, our research aims to examine the longer-term impact of engineering design education on graduates’ career paths and their practical utilization of design, post-graduation. We have focused our attention on several decades of alumni from two specific graduate course sequences, Project-Based Engineering Design Innovation & Development (ME310) and Smart Product Design (ME218), in order to gain a deeper understanding of how particular course elements and strategies are directly linked to what alumni retain and take away from their education. These course sequences represent two possible Mechanical Engineering depth areas that leverage a project-based learning approach to allow students to dive deeply into designing and building functional systems of some engineering complexity. In this chapter, we describe a multifaceted and mixed methods research effort that considers decades of graduates from ME310 and ME218 at Stanford University. The qualitative interviews and quantitative survey studies were designed to establish a deeper understanding of the longer-term impact of education on career plans and pathways (particularly as related to engineering innovation and entrepreneurship) and to also demonstrate the need to take a “bigger view” of graduates’ feedback on courses and on their formal education more generally. The analyses of this rich dataset are already bearing fruit by allowing us to identify specific curricular “features” that inspire innovative and entrepreneurial actions. We are also seeing how ME310 and ME218 graduates have built careers in a variety of professions, are scattered around the globe, and do not follow a singular career pathway or even dominant industry sector. Some stay highly technical throughout their post-graduate work, whereas others turn to less technical roles immediately after graduation.