Maura Borrego
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Education Research
The United States produces four times as many engineering master's graduates as PhDs. Yet almost nothing is known about why people pursue an engineering master's degree, how they plan their careers, or which skills industry actually expects of them.
- Fields
Education Research
Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
engineering education
master's students
graduate education
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Extract the skills employers want from engineering master's degree holders by applying natural language processing (NLP), including generative AI, to more than a decade of engineering job postings.
- Interview current mechanical engineering master's students about their reasons for pursuing the degree and the skills they hope to gain.
- Combine the job-posting analysis with the interview findings to identify alignments and misalignments between employer demands and students' views of the workforce.
- Develop NLP methods for analyzing skills in job advertisements that can transfer to other disciplines, employment sectors, and education research questions.
More about the research
Most research on engineering graduate students has focused on doctoral students. As a result, master's programs have little evidence for shaping their courses or for attracting students, especially domestic students.
Why it matters
The findings could help universities design master's curricula around the skills employers seek. They could also give prospective students, employers, and administrators clearer information about what a mechanical engineering master's degree offers, and suggest ways to recruit more domestic students into programs that supply the technology workforce.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Andrew Katz
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Education Research·Early-career
Extract the skills employers request from more than a decade of engineering job postings, using natural language processing (computer analysis of text) and a skill-extraction algorithm focused on mechanical engineering master's roles.
Glen Miller
Texas A&M University-College Station, TX·Education Research
Catalog current and planned AI ethics education interventions across diverse U.S. colleges, including community colleges and minority-serving institutions, through a national survey.
Rebecca Williams
University of Maryland-Baltimore County, MD·Education Research
Identify the knowledge, skills and attitudes new software engineers and developers need in an AI-driven workplace, through semi-structured interviews with current employees and hiring decision makers.
The school
University of Texas at Austin: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 871 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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