Background: Engineering curricula are built around faculty and accreditors' perceptions of what knowledge, skills, and abilities graduates will need in engineering careers. However, the people making these decisions may not be fully aware of what industry employers require for engineering graduates.Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study is to determine how industry employer‐sought professional and technical skills vary among engineering disciplines and levels of education.Design/Method: Using a large sample (n = 26,103) of mined job advertisements, we use the O*NET skills database to determine the frequencies of different professional and technical skills for biomedical, civil, chemical, electrical, environmental, and mechanical engineers with bachelor's, master's, and PhD degrees.Results: The most frequently sought professional skill is problem‐solving; the most frequently sought technical skills across disciplines are Microsoft Office software and computer‐aided design software. Although not the most frequently requested skills, job advertisements including the Python and MATLAB programming languages paid significantly higher salaries than those without.Conclusions: The findings of this study have important implications for engineering program leaders and curriculum designers choosing which skills to teach students so that they are best prepared to get and excel in engineering jobs. The results also show which skills students can prioritize investing their time in so that they receive the largest financial return on their investment.

Background: Despite many initiatives to improve graduate student and faculty diversity in engineering, there has been little or no change in the percentage of people from racially minoritized backgrounds in either of these groups.Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this paper is to counter the scarcity fallacy, in which institutions blame the “shortage” of qualified people from traditionally marginalized backgrounds for their own lack of representation, related to prospective PhD students and prospective faculty from traditionally marginalized groups. This study identifies the BS‐to‐PhD and PhD‐to‐tenure‐track‐faculty institutional pathways of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino engineering doctorate recipients.Design/Method: Using the US Survey of Earned Doctorates, we tracked the BS‐to‐PhD institutional pathways of 3952 Black/African American and 5732 Hispanic/Latino engineering PhD graduates. We also used the Survey of Doctorate Recipients to track the PhD‐to‐tenure‐track faculty pathways of 104 Black/African American and 211 Hispanic/Latino faculty.Results: The majority of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino PhD graduates in this study did not earn their BS degrees from Top 25 institutions, but rather from Not Top 25, non‐US, and minority‐serving institutions. The results also show the relatively small proportion of PhD earners and faculty members who move into highly ranked institutions after earning a bachelor's degree from outside this set of institutions.Conclusions: The findings of this study have important implications for graduate student and faculty recruitment by illustrating that recruitment from a narrow range of institutions (i.e., Top 25 institutions) is unlikely to result in increased diversity among racially minoritized PhDs and faculty in engineering.

Germanane (GeH), a hydrogen-terminated layered germanium structure, has recently been synthesized. Here, we employed a four-probe thermal transport measurement method to obtain the basal-plane thermal conductivity of thin exfoliated GeH flakes and correlated the measurement results with the crystal structure. The obtained thermal conductivity increases with increasing temperature, suggesting that extrinsic grain boundary and defect scattering dominate over intrinsic phonon-phonon scattering. Annealing a polycrystalline GeH sample at 195 °C caused it to become amorphous, reducing the room-temperature thermal conductivity from 0.53 ± 0.09 W m⁻¹ K⁻¹, which is close to the value calculated for 16 nm grain size, to 0.29 ± 0.05 W m⁻¹ K⁻¹, which approaches the calculated amorphous limit in the basal plane thermal conductivity.

Graduate education is a formative time in the career of young engineers and future faculty members. In this chapter, focused predominantly on the context of US graduate engineering education, we begin by presenting an overview of available data about graduate education, its contexts, and the gaps in what data are available. This chapter discusses topics that span students’ graduate school experience, including motivation to pursue graduate studies, skills development, and identity development, as well as career preparation, decision-making, and transitions to the workforce for different sectors of postgraduate employment. The authors examine institutional practices that affect aspiring and current graduate students, such as the recruitment of diverse students and why it is hard to change graduate education. Finally, the chapter identifies gaps in the literature and proposes new directions for future research, including a greater focus on master’s-level engineering education, retention of graduate students from marginalized backgrounds, students’ perspectives of the decision to accept an offer when choosing between graduate programs, as well as comparative research that considers graduate education research from around the globe.

Background: In addition to the benefits of a diverse faculty, many institutions are under pressure from students and administrators to increase the number of faculty from historically excluded backgrounds. Despite increases in the numbers of engineering PhD earners from these groups, the percentages of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino tenure‐track faculty have not increased, and the percentage of women remains low.Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify how experiences in graduate school encourage or deter PhD earners from historically excluded groups in pursuing an engineering academic career.Method: We conducted 20 semi‐structured interviews with engineering PhD students and recent graduates, with half of participants interested and half disinterested in pursuing an academic career after graduation.Results: Three key factors emerged as strongly influential on participants' desire to pursue an academic career: their relationship with their advisor, their perception of their advisor's work–life balance, and their perception of the culture of academia. Participants extrapolated their experiences in graduate school to their imagined lives as faculty. The results illuminate the reasons why engineering PhD earners from historically underrepresented groups remain in or leave the academic career pathway after graduate school.Conclusions: The findings of this study have important implications for how graduate students' and postdoc's relationships with their advisors as well as perceptions of their advisors' work–life balances and the culture of academia affect future faculty. We make recommendations on what students, faculty, and administrators can do to create a more inclusive environment to encourage students from historically excluded groups to consider academic careers.