Work In Progress: Sojourns and Pathways: Personal and professional identity formation and attitudes toward learning among college women

Understanding how women develop a sense of professional identity in engineering, computer science, and technology can inform the design of interventions to improve their rates of entry and persistence in these fields. We seek to understand how female students conceptualize and form personal and professional identities in the context of pursing a college education. In the initial phase of a five-year study at Smith College, we conducted interviews with undergraduate engineering and non-engineering majors. Participants were asked questions about their personal and professional goals, interests and destinations, their philosophies of education, and the role of student life experience and identity in their approach to learning. We report results to date for three key questions covering each of these topics, and offer a preliminary comparative analysis that describes differences by field of study and by class year