(D-129) Undergraduate Internship Programs as Predictors of Career Outcomes in Undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Students

Introduction:: Internships are high-impact practices that have long been recognized to increase student retention and engagement rates at the undergraduate level. This can be due to many factors including the significant investment of effort and time students contribute to internships, exposure to a diverse environment of people from different backgrounds and a variety of work settings, and engaging and working with faculty and employers on critical projects. While many engineering students engage in internship opportunities, it is still unclear how internship experiences can be integrated into the student’s educational development. Understanding students’ decisions to continue developing their skills through the industry workforce or follow career paths more aligned with academia is important to better integrate academic and work-related experiences in biomedical engineering spaces. At our university, biomedical engineering (BME) undergraduate students can receive course credit for undertaking an internship in a relative field. We believe participating in an internship before job searching is vital in helping students decide on their career path. To test this hypothesis, internship and career data on students registered for the internship course were collected over a span of 5 years. The overall objective of this study is to determine if the experience of an undergraduate internship can influence and serve as a predictor for biomedical engineering students’ decisions on post-graduate careers.

Materials and Methods:: Internship type, year, student cohort, and employment type after graduation of 64 undergraduate BME students at the university were collected from 2015 – 2020. Only students registered in the undergraduate BME internship course were included in the data set. Employment after graduation was collected via public data included within the prior student’s LinkedIn profile.

Results, Conclusions, and Discussions:: 30-50% of each undergraduate class participated in the internship course, with 7-18 students per cohort participating in an internship per year (Figure 1A). The majority of internships were in the industry category (63%), followed by academia (23%), military (8%), and medical (6%) (Figure 1B). After examining the career types of graduates who participated in an internship, we found that there was a decrease in individuals in industry (63% to 56%), medical (6% to 3%), and military (8% to 6%) careers compared to students who had industry, medical, and military internships during their undergraduate work. On the other hand, there was an increase in individuals who had academic careers, compared to students who participated in academic internships by an increase of 7%. When examining the trajectory of students from the type of internship they participated in, to the career they pursued after graduation, it is clear that many students switched to different career paths compared to their internship (Figure 1C). Assuming that students participated in internships that they had the most interest in pursuing as a career, our future work includes comparing this data with the career paths of students who had not participated in an internship to provide insight into how participating in an internship may influence future career paths of undergraduate students in biomedical engineering.

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