Bridging Engineering and Leadership Development Through a Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies Degree Program

Abstract

While engineering is often perceived as a highly technical field, leadership and other professional skills have become central to preparing undergraduate engineering students for careers in industry. With growing attention to the leadership dimensions of engineering practice, formal or programmatic leadership development remains largely absent from engineering curricula, occurring instead in co-curricular and extracurricular spaces. This dissertation examines the leadership development experiences of engineering students through a qualitative descriptive case study of the Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies (LAES) undergraduate degree program at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. This study is guided by a modified version of Rottmann et al.'s (2015) framework of engineering leadership, which originally identified three orientations to leadership in engineering: technical knowledge, collaborative optimization, and organizational innovation. Based on a review of existing literature, this dissertation proposes a fourth orientation: societal impact, or more commonly found in this study, community impact, defined as leadership focused on creating global or societal change beyond a team or organizational setting through engagement with identifiable communities. This study explores how and to what extent each of these four orientations manifests within the LAES undergraduate degree program. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with ten current LAES students and six LAES-affiliated faculty and staff, as well as document analysis of program materials such as syllabi and curriculum sheets. Three research questions guided this study: how students experience the four dimensions of engineering leadership; how those experiences shape their engineering identity; and how the curriculum supports their development of engineering leadership. Findings reveal that engineering leadership and engineering identity are not separate program outcomes but rather co-constructive processes that develop together within the conditions created by the LAES program. The LAES undergraduate degree program cultivates these outcomes structurally more than simply through explicit leadership instruction, raising important questions about how engineering leadership is named, recognized, and transferred into professional contexts. Students did not mainly develop leadership dispositions through explicit instruction, nor did they arrive at an engineering identity passively. Instead, both emerged through purposeful, community-facing work that simultaneously demanded technical competence, collaborative engagement, and reflective practice. This dissertation concludes with implications for the LAES program and for engineering education more broadly, arguing that when students are asked to lead real projects, work across disciplines, and engage with communities outside the classroom, something significant happens to how they understand themselves and what they believe engineering is for.