The Hero’s Journey: First-year engineering students’ visual narratives of personal and professional development

In many cultures, engineering is considered a prestigious and highly regarded occupation, therefore studying engineering could be considered an ‘investment’ in a prosperous life. Yet, do Australian students actively and conscientiously choose engineering to build social and economic capital in their life? We provided first-year engineering students with professional development opportunities, where we asked them to depict (through drawing and annotation) how they will reach their future selves (five years from present) including key milestones on the way towards their long-term goals. The aim of our research was to characterise first-year engineering students’ depictions (i.e., their Blueprints) of the first five years of their engineering career and determine if they perceive engineering as a pathway to prosperity. Our research was grounded in an interpretive qualitative approach with datasets of 157 Blueprint artifacts from 53 first-year engineering students’ from two cohorts (2018-2019). We used a critical visual methodology (Rose, 2016) combining conventional content analysis and narrative inquiry, looking for composition, visual and textual content, and socio-cultural themes. Students commonly used the metaphor of a journey to depict their five years through university. They travelled through perilous terrain (mountains), unknown pathways (maps, mazes), and traversed uphill climbs to a better life. We propose the students are depicting key stages of the Hero’s journey including the road of trials (trials and tribulation) and the self-transformation of the adventurer. Exemplars include: Shooting for the Moon, the Spiral yellow-brick-road, An uphill cycle, the Maze with hidden pathways, the Tree. At the end of their journey students described a multitude of rewards for their hard work, namely increased social and economic capital (i.e., travel, secure employment, increased property, and assets) Our students depicted university as four years of hard work and adventure leading to the Great Australian Dream: travel, property, and wealth. However, will reality live up to their expectations of what lies at the end of the yellow-brick-road? How can we support students through global challenges that disrupt student’s imagined futures, and potentially diminishing their motivation to continue engineering? We advocate tapping into student’s intrinsic motivation for being an engineer: design, creativity, play, and helping communities to endure social and economic disruption.