Work in Progress: A Student Perspective - Why Women Choose Service-Learning

Purdue University's EPICS program is a service-learning program that attracts women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields at higher rates than the overall population. While many features of the EPICS program align with approaches cited in the literature for encouraging women to participate in STEM fields, there has not been an in-depth investigation from the female engineering students' perspective. In this work, we give a voice to female engineering students participating in EPICS. Through semi-structured interviews with six students investigate why women choose engineering as a major, why they are attracted to the EPICS program, and how the EPICS program matches their objectives. This summarizes our work in progress including descriptions of the participants, project status and expected outcomes. Based preliminary data analysis, we found themes of students knowing an engineer, viewing EPICS as theory application with "real-world" relevance and finding learning from each other through EPICS