Work-in-Progress: Using Social Media to Build and Grow an Engineering Community on a Small Campus

Building a strong community among undergraduate students, faculty, and program alumni is one of the important factors determining the success of an undergraduate engineering program. As part of this community, maintaining a connection with program alumni is vital for assessing the achievement of the program educational objectives. Even with a small engineering program such as our Mechanical Engineering program, establishing an engineering community can be complicated due to factors such as the very diverse student population, and the lack of an alumni association in the school. Many of the students in our program work full time, and most are part time students. The students go through the program as non-cohort groups, making information dissemination more difficult. This paper focuses on the use of social media including Facebook and LinkedIn in creating and growing our engineering community. While Facebook is more popular with the younger population of students, and used mostly for social type of activities and discussions, LinkedIn is the preponderant medium for program alumni, as well as more mature students who are in professional positions and desire to widen their networks. We are also using these media in combination with more traditional activities such as student chapters of professional societies. The paper will discuss features and statistics, and draw initial conclusions on the effectiveness of the above media in growing our engineering community. Future plans and recommendations will also be outlined.