Engineering Competition Team recruitment and integration strategies impact on team diversity

Abstract

Engineering Competition Teams (ECT) recruit and integrate new members every year. We interviewed groups of students at two national and international competitions about the methods they use to recruit and retain students, in an effort to understand why ECT have low participation of students from underrepresented groups. None of the teams that were interviewed were especially diverse, in spite of our efforts to interview diverse students. We categorized their recruitment activities into strategies that require direct person interaction with a degree of personal invitation (active) and those that do not (passive) using a theoretical framework provided by Cegler [1]. Not all passive recruiting is done in ways that completely avoid personal interaction. Thus, for ECT, Cegler's passive category was separated into two categories: direct and indirect recruiting. Teams generally had more numerous recruiting strategies than integration strategies. We analyzed integration strategies using the theoretical framework of legitimate peripheral participation [2]. We found that while a handful of teams were using strategies that could fit into this theoretical framework, most were making critical mistakes including trying to integrate too many students and failing to allow new recruits to work at meaningful projects. The paper concludes with recommendations for recruiting and integration practices that may improve team diversity.