Ethics training: Cultivating an ethical engineer identity

There is limited research regarding the impact of current engineering ethics programs on the development of engineers. Most of the literature on this topic does not discuss the role ethics plays in how engineers regard their identity as engineers. Our 4-year NSF funded project directly addresses this oversight by assessing the impact of integrating engineering ethics education with student engineering internships. This is being conducted jointly at Florida Polytechnic University (FPU) and the University of South Florida (USF). Realizing that both academia and industry play an important role in the professional formation of engineers, we are developing an approach that merges engineering ethics training in an academic setting with internships in an industrial setting. The aims are to: 1) promote the development of ethical sensitivity and reasoning skills in engineering students as they serve in industrial internships just before beginning their professional careers, and 2) promote the establishment of ethics as a core concern associated with their sense of identity as engineers. The purpose of this paper is to present the rationale for and description of our proposed intervention.