My journey began in August of 2017 with the inception of my graduate education career in the Civil Engineering Department at Ohio State University. Initially, all I wanted was a PhD in Engineering Education and my enrollment in the Civil Engineering Master’s program was a way to get credit hours while I waited for the acceptance of the PhD program at OSU. Just for a little background about me, I received my Bachelor’s in civil engineering but wasn’t excited about the jobs available, a.k.a. civil engineering was not my calling, but during my undergraduate career I thoroughly enjoyed experiences in engineering education research and being a teaching assistant. As a graduate student, my disinclination toward civil engineering as a long-term career has not changed. However, after a couple of conversations with Engineering Education Department faculty and a little digging of my own I became interested in the possibility of doing a technical Transportation Engineering Master’s with an education focused thesis. You may ask, “what does that mean?” In short, most, if not all of the courses I take would be focused in transportation engineering topics while my thesis would focus on bettering the education of transportation engineering majors.
I began researching what others have done to better the transportation engineering education experience and found very few instances of research based in transportation engineering education. This gap leaves room for new research and gave me hope that I could create a thesis topic that would help to fill it. I went to my civil engineering advisor with multiple potential thesis topics centered in assessing the current climate and future needs of transportation engineering education. I was extremely nervous for that meeting. I worried that his response to my proposal would be something along the lines of “No, that’s crazy, you can’t do that here!” As it turns out he did not like any one of my specific thesis topic ideas but was interested in a mixture of my ideas with some of his own. After discussions between Civil Engineering Department and Engineering Education Department faculty members throughout this past semester I was approved to do an education focused thesis! I will be starting work on my thesis this summer and couldn’t be more excited to continue my journey in engineering education!
Meg West