The ‘time filler’ project that grew into another conference paper: University portrayal of undergraduate engineering: variation and implications.
Once I’d decided I wanted to interview female engineering students for my research, I was raring to go and wanted to grab some students and ask them about how and why they chose their university. But, inevitably, it’s not that simple. The next step was to clarify my selection criteria for interviewees and more details of what I would be asking them about, then apply for the university to give ethics approval for the study. Once that process was complete, I needed to reach the students which I chose to do through ‘gatekeepers’ at my target universities who would send ‘recruitment’ information to students to sign up to take part. Sitting day after day and waiting to see if anyone had any willing participants had stepped up and filled in the sign-up form didn’t feel best use of my time, so I filled in the time by looking in more detail at the course webpages for the universities to see if anything might have influenced a prospective student’s decision. And, pretty quickly, this became a mini-project in itself and I was keen to share what I was finding.
If you want to present your work at a conference, you need to submit an abstract of the paper months in advance. In my case, I had a sense of what I was finding but hadn’t yet pinned down anything resembling a rigorous research methodology never mind drawing any useful conclusion. I felt this was a bit dodgy, as, further down the line the cart was rather leading the horse. As in so many stages of my research, this was definitely ‘all part of the learning process’.
The result was a paper presented at the Uk and Ireland Engineering Education Research Network Annual Symposium in July 2025 looking at course webpages for mechanical and electrical & electronic engineering at 13 English universities: 5 post-92, 8 pre-92 or which 4 are in the Russell Group. I ended up focussing on three areas:
- Is it for me – do I ‘fit’ what they want, and will I feel at home there?
- What will studying be like – what is the course offering?
- What will I get out of it – what do graduates go on to do and is it ‘worth it’?
The last question turned out to be the most innovative. How can we measure the ‘value’ of a course? In other education systems that might relate to how much it costs, but in England the tuition fees are the same for all. However, I decided to look at how much international students are charged and then compare that with entry requirements, and the ‘Discover Uni’ information on the percentage of graduates in employment or further study.
The irony is that having submitted the abstract, a constant flow of interview participants appeared, so I no longer needed to find something to fill the time. However, I have no regrets as I was also learning how to manage qualitative data for the first time.
My conference paper is available as 5:13 on the Symposium proceedings. Looking at it now, it is rather dry – my presentation was more interactive encouraging delegates to question their own assumptions about what is offered by different universities and the varied opportunities a BEng graduate may have experienced.
