In Fall 2016, Campbell University welcomed its first cohort of engineering majors, the culmination of fourteen months of planning and recruiting. Building a new school of engineering affords a number of unique opportunities, including the chance to develop an engineering program based on best practices, engineering education research, and the recommendations of national reports such as "Educating the Engineer of 2020," among others. Central to starting a new engineering program is crafting a unique business case, complete with a marketing and recruiting plan designed to attract a cohort of students willing to partner with the faculty and staff to create the communicated vision. In this paper, we identify the key obstacles to attracting a diverse cohort of students to a new program, along with the evidence-based strategies used to tackle those obstacles in recruiting for the new engineering program. We report on the diversity of both our newly admitted students and the students transferring into engineering from other schools in the university. We will also report on retention efforts, derived from best practices, and enrollment data at the end of the first semester, as well as examining an early snapshot of the diversity of our second year of entering students.
Dr. Carpenter is Founding Dean of Engineering at Campbell University. She is Chair of the ASEE Long-Rangge Planning Committee and the ASEE Strategic Doing Governance Team. She is a past Vice President of Professional Interest Councils for ASEE and past
Lee Rynearson an Associate Professor of Engineering at Campbell University. He received a B.S. and M.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2008 and earned his PhD in Engineering Education from Purdue University in 20
Dr. Lynn Albers is a proponent of Hands-On Activities in the classroom and during out-of-school time programs. She believes that they complement any teaching style thereby reaching all learning styles. She just recently earned her doctorate in Mechanical Engineering from North Carolina State University where her research spanned three colleges and focused on Engineering Education. Her passions include but are not limited to Engineering Education and Energy Engineering. Lynn is currently an Assistant Professor in the newly founded School of Engineering at Campbell University.
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