May 17, 2021
We would like to congratulate undergraduate researchers Hindo Kamanda and Davis Wilson on the publication of their journal article, The Role of Expectations in the Educational Experience and Professional Socialization of Engineering Students in the Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice (JHETP) as lead authors in collaboration with Dr. Joachim Walther.
Hindo Kamanda is the publication’s first co-author. He led the qualitative analysis and writing of the article. He is currently leading a strand of the larger enquiry into shame and its impact on students’ professional socialization. He graduated cum laude with an undergraduate degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering from the University of Georgia in 2020. During his time at UGA, Hindo served as a learning assistant and participated in several on-campus organizations. In addition to his two publications as first co-author with EETI, he was recognized for his research achievements at the LSAMP STEM Innovators Conference. He also received several academic awards while at UGA, including the ECE Chair’s Award for Academic Achievement.
Davis Wilson is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering and a Masters of Business Administration through the Double Dawgs program at the University of Georgia. Over the four years he has been at UGA, Davis has been very involved in the UGA and Athens community where he has served as a Resident Assistant, Student Ambassador for the College of Engineering, Vice President of LSAMP, and, most recently, was elected to be the President of UGA’s Tau Beta Gamma Engineering Honor Society for the 2021-2022 school year. In addition to his contributions to the above-mentioned research, Davis is also leading a study analyzing the difference in the way that minority and majority engineering students perceive, internalize, and respond to expectations within the engineering context. After graduating in May 2022, Davis plans on embarking upon a career in Transportation Engineering.
Situated within a larger, NSF-funded ethnographic inquiry into shame and its transformative impact on the professional socialization of engineering students, the study published in JHETP classified the sources expectations that engineering students perceive and the mechanisms through which expectations are internalized.
The findings identified academics (tests and other course evaluations), engineering peers (pressure to fit in), engineering superiors (including instructors and other administrators), extracurricular activities (internships and campus involvement), and influences from outside the major (parental pressure and general engineering stereotypes) as the primary co-producers of dynamic and interconnected expectations.
Students potentially perceive these interacting expectations as compounding and forming a system of expectations that exceeds the sum of its parts, triangulating to further amplify culturally-prevalent expectations, or even as a trade-off between seemingly conflicting expectations. The manuscript further describes the impact of subjective elements such as the personality and circumstances of individual students which might influence the expectations they perceive and their approaches to navigating them. These findings based on and illustrated through the lived experiences of engineering students, provide valuable insights into how students evaluate and prioritize expectations, and especially how educators can empathically present expectations while maintaining academic standards.
Congratulations again to our young researchers! Given the rigorous climate of academic publishing, it is a truly remarkable feat for undergraduate students to be lead authors on a journal article.