Professor, Biomedical Engineering University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
Introduction: Professional skills exhibited by biomedical engineering (BME) graduates are widely considered to be critically important for success in their field following graduation[1-2]. Representatives from industry have consistently rated professional skills—including the ability to work in teams, communication skills (written & oral), & project management—among their top criteria for incoming hires (most recently from a 2019 BME Council of Chairs survey of 150 people in industry from 74 companies in the med-tech and biotech industries). Additionally, ABET requires graduates of accredited BME programs to be able to communicate effectively, to recognize professional responsibilities, to function effectively on teams, and to be able to acquire and apply new knowledge as needed. Systematic quantitative analyses of BME student perspectives on professional skills, however, are currently lacking. In particular, student self-identified areas of professional growth provide valuable data in assessing alignment not only with curricular objectives, but also with expectations of external stakeholders (e.g. industry). At the University of Virginia, we surveyed incoming BME Capstone students to identify perceived professional strengths and weaknesses, and we analyzed the results to determine the most prevalent strengths and weakness, assessed gender biases in the results, and compared to prior years’ survey results.
Materials and Methods: The BME Capstone program at the University of Virginia is a two-semester sequence taken during the senior year. At the very beginning of the fall semester, we administered a personal information survey to the students, wherein they describe their career goals, their topical interests in Capstone projects, their prior experience outside the classroom, their top five self-reported professional strengths that are most important to them (“List your personal and professional strengths: Most important to me are my…”), and their top five professional weaknesses that they hope to improve on during their senior year (“List your personal and professional weaknesses: I would most like to improve on my…”). A coded analysis of the professional strengths and weaknesses was then performed, wherein free responses to each of the survey questions was categorized into 47 strengths and 58 weaknesses. We specifically focused on the weaknesses, binning them into 7 broader categories: organization, time, & project management; professional communication; confidence, self-advocacy, and willingness to take risks; teamwork & interpersonal relations; technical skills & experience; career & interviewing skills; and work-life balance. We then assessed whether there were any cross-correlations among responses, as well as gender/racial biases in these categories, or correlation with GPA. Finally, we compared results with older survey data from prior years.
Results, Conclusions, and Discussions:
A total of 115 students were surveyed in Fall 2022, consisting of 61% women and 10% URM. The most prevalent self-reported professional strengths were organization/time management (listed by 51% of respondents), teamwork (43%), communication (36%), work ethic (35%), capacity for growth (35%), critical thinking (29%), people skills (28%), and resilience (28%). The professional weaknesses, after binning into 7 broader categories, included professional communication (67% of respondents), organization and time/project management (58%), confidence & self-advocacy (57%), technical skills/experience (40%), teamwork (37%), work-life balance (37%), and career/networking/interviewing skills (26%). Contingency table analysis of gender biases in the perceived weaknesses revealed only communication to be significantly different (Barnard’s p=0.0385), for which 74% women indicated that as an area of growth (compared to 56% of men). No other growth area showed a significant gender bias, although confidence / self-advocacy and teamwork were closest (confidence p=0.12, with 60% women vs. 51% men listing as a growth area; and teamwork p=0.103, with 47% of men vs. 31% of women listing as a growth area). No significant correlation with perceived weaknesses and either GPA or URM status was observed (although students in the bottom GPA quartile listed organization and time management as a growth area much more than those in the top GPA quartile—73% vs. 48%; however, Barnard’s p=0.0553, so this result did not meet statistical significance).
Our results suggest that women are significantly more likely to possess perceived deficiencies in professional communication skills. Upon breaking this category down to the original coded data, public speaking was the differentiator (50% women vs. 20% of men, Barnard’s p=0.0012). Women also were more likely to list self-confidence than men were. The growth area of communication is one that is emphasized in our program (as in most BME Capstone programs), indicating an alignment with this most common perceived weakness in the 2022 survey. Our program fosters multiple opportunities for public speaking (small and large-group), networking (three networking sessions), writing, and email communication. In the future we plan to reassess surveys near the end of the year to ascertain whether the self-identified strengths and growth areas change during the senior year.
Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Dr. Shayn Peirce-Cottler for helping to develop the student survey, Dr. Shannon Barker, Dr. Kristen Naegle, and Kitter Bishop for useful discussion, and Dr. Dawn Elliott for suggesting a key line of inquiry in the data analysis.
References: 1. Allen, T.E. & Peirce-Cottler, S.M. Career Development and Professionalism within a Biomedical Engineering Capstone Course. Proceedings of the 2008 ASEE Conference & Exposition (2008). https://peer.asee.org/4316
2. Jamison, C.S.E., Wang, A.A., Huang-Saad, A. et al. BME Career Exploration: Examining Students’ Connection with the Field. Biomed Eng Education2, 17–29 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43683-021-00059-8
