Clemson University, Engineering and Science Education, ESED

ESED Holiday Office Party Murder Mystery! What a wonderful time. Great actors. They all played their part!

Stop by to see us at the ASEE conference in Baltimore. Booth 1008

Please help us congratulate Catherine Kenyon, who recently received her Ph.D. in engineering and science education, her third degree from Clemson University! In a new reflection of her decade at Clemson, she details why she and some of her colleagues broke with conventional wisdom to become "Triple Tigers," her keys to progress and the common thread connecting all doctoral graduates. Dr. Kenyon pursued her Ph.D. under Dr. Lisa Benson.

Copy and paste to read the full piece: https://news.clemson.edu/graduate-reflections-the-worth-of-our-experiences/

ESED Awards Ceremony: Celebrating our Faculty/Staff and students. Congratulations to all for an amazing year!

If Stephanie Damas needs some inspiration, all she has to do is look at the engraving on her wood-grain smartphone case.

Below her name, it reads, “ELECTRICAL ENGINEER” and “THEY WOULD BE PROUD .”

ND are the shared initials for her late older brother, Nostra Damas, who died in a car wreck when she was a high school senior in Florida, and her late father, Nocles Damas, who died 100 days before she graduated from Florida State University with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering.

Stephanie is honoring their memory by pursuing master’s in computer science and Ph.D. in engineering and science education at Clemson University.

“I finally found what my father had been trying to guide me to– a place where I could trailblaze,” Stephanie said. “I don’t know any other Haitian American that is doing engineering education. I also don’t know any other person that is doing research on Black students thriving. I found a space that literally only I occupy, and that’s what my father has wanted from me my entire life.”

After the wreck, Stephanie wanted to work on car computer systems. Maybe if there were more safeguards in place, she thought, future tragedies could be prevented

While at FSU, she went through a dark time and found that electrical engineering wasn’t the best fit for her. Then she discovered the work of Lisa Benson, a Clemson professor of engineering and science education.

Stephanie remembers hearing Dr. Benson talk at a colloquium about her student motivation research and seeing herself in Dr. Benson’s stories.

Dr. Benson offered Stephanie a chance to study with her through a National Science Foundation (NSF) program called Research Experiences for Undergraduates.

“I never looked back,” Stephanie said.

Later, Stephanie received a prestigious scholarship through the NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program. She is now in her second year as a Ph.D. student and in her first year of pursuing a master’s degree

After receiving her degrees, she would like to become a director of diversity and inclusion at a university or engineering firm.

The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity (CoNECD) is a distinctive conference that pulls in graduate students, faculty, practitioners, and industry partners to discuss science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education issues and research. The American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) offers CoNECD as one of its premiere national conferences that especially focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues.

In their paper, Lived Experiences and Literature Reviews: Leveraging Experiential
Knowledge in STEM Education Doctoral Studies, Sharetta Bufford, Stephanie Damas, Dr. Matthew Voigt, and Dr. Eliza Gallagher, share their lived experiences and encourage readers to have meaningful conversations about leveraging lived experiences in literature reviews, especially researchers exploring marginalized and/or under-researched identities.

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For the presentation, I started the talk off with introductions as I was presenting with Sharetta Bufford, Matt Voigt, and Eliza Gallagher. This presentation was about fostering a supportive mentoring space during a global pandemic where I led the audience through a personal and emotional check-in, discussed the context of our research group and the motivation behind the direction and support of our mentoring space such as the structure of paired progress meetings and the utilization of holistic review processes.

Today we salute Clemson ESED Certificate alumnus Tripp Shealy, Associate Professor at Virginia Tech. Here is what he had to say about the ESED Certificate program at Clemson University.
Find out more about our program on March 30 at 6:00 pm ET.
Register: https://clemson.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMvduGsqjwtE9EkpDbfUgrUN5sANRgZJj1f

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ESED alumni Catherine McGough Spence , Adam Kirn and ESED faculty member Lisa Benson co-authored a paper just published in the Journal of Engineering Education, “Perceptions of future careers for middle year engineering students” (https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20455). This work presents important insights about how engineering students think about their future, and how that shapes what they are doing right now. Catherine was the Outstanding Graduate Researcher in ESED in 2019 and is now an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Adam has won multiple awards in his field and is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education at the University of Nevada, Reno.