Catherine G.P. Berdanier

A degree is not enough: Promoting engineering identity development and professional planning through the teaching of engineering résumé writing

Undergraduate engineering students are often taught to create their engineering résumés early in their academic careers as part of first-year composition or technical writing classes. Often, these classes are not taught by engineering faculty, and few resources exist for engineering-specific résumé development. A corpus of 31 engineering résumés was collected, representing engineers across experience levels and engineering fields and analyzed through genre analysis methods in order to understand the linguistic mechanisms by which engineers present the merit of their work in a condensed résumé format in order to develop an intervention to help instructors of technical writing and first year engineering develop engineering résumés in a disciplinary context. The intervention facilitates student reflection on authentic engineering résumés leading them toward their own learning regarding effective presentation of engineering experiences on a résumé, as well as to encourage engineering students to plan effectively for the experiences that will help them achieve their desired careers.

Optimizing a genre analysis framework to investigate engineering literature reviews

This brief paper chronicles the development and validation of a genre analysis framework as part of an ongoing research study that investigates how graduate engineering students compose literature reviews in an effort to enter into their disciplinary communities. The literature review in particular proves troublesome for graduate students in technical fields, as most engineering students have not been taught nor required to write a literature review until their masters thesis or dissertation proposal. The present research is timely and relevant, offering technical communication faculty strategies to demystify and better train engineers to communicate in academic settings.