Instilling a software engineering mindset through freshman Seminar

Student retention is a challenge faced by all engineering programs. Our first year software engineering students have schedules filled with computer science, mathematics, science and humanities. The lack of any exposure to engineering meant some students, expressing a dislike for software engineering, left the program before they had any exposure to the discipline. To address this issue, we created a one credit Software Engineering Freshman Seminar, which all entering students take in their first term at RIT. This lets us insure student/faculty contact early in the program, as well as providing an opportunity to introduce engineering concepts and practices early in each student´s program of study. This paper discusses the seminar´s current incarnation. In particular, we focus on those aspects of the course which help students identify with software engineering as a profession. The challenge we face is achieving this goal with students whose technical knowledge and skills are modest. We have settled on an approach that provides experience with teamwork, requirements elicitation, and the effects of change, and addressing professional ethics. These in-class activities are complemented by an assignment to interview a practicing software engineer and to write an interview summary for discussion. This activity ensemble serves to disabuse students of the notion that software engineering is little more than programming, or that the discipline is identical to computer science. Should a student exit the program at this point, at least he or she knows a bit about what they are leaving behind.