Capturing the experiences of ESL graduate students in engineering education

Doctoral education can be a challenging and overwhelming journey for many graduate students. Engineering Education as an interdisciplinary and emerging field welcomes diverse students in terms of race and ethnicity, gender, nationality, sexual orientations, abilities, and language. Given the diversity within this field, engineering education students' experiences in this journey can be very different from one another during their doctoral years. Like any other diverse settings, engineering education students may have needs in common or completely different which required different ways of support. In this study, we are a group of engineering education students and alumni who speak English as our second language (ESL). Using co-operative inquiry, we aimed to reflect on our doctoral journey in engineering education and highlight the challenges we went through and ways we were able to overcome them. We are taking the positionality of researcher to participant to examine our experiences. The challenges are mostly centered over cultural differences, identity formation, language barriers and expectations from ourselves and our community including peers, faculty, staff, and people beyond the engineering education community. This study can convey a message to other ESL graduate students that they are not alone in this journey. Furthermore, the findings of our study highlights the approaches that other ESL students can take to help them overcome the challenges that they may face. Finally, the findings of this study can inform current and future faculty, policymakers, and school administrators about the ways they can support their ESL students.