A letter to the future engineer: Exploring cross-cultural engineering identities through practitioners' letters of advice

Engineering education researchers have been trying to improve the quality of engineering education. Related to these efforts, it is important to revisit and better understand the definition of engineering education. As part of our PhD coursework, we were required to create a short video depicting our understanding of the definition of engineering education. For this purpose, we created “a letter to the future engineer” that presented a holistic view of the challenges and opportunities involved in the professional practice of engineering. To write our letter, we collected real letters of advice from practicing engineers with varying demographic characteristics and experiences. Thematic analysis of the letters uncovered some country-level differences in terms of priorities, perceptions, and the professional life of the contributing engineers. The aim of this work-in-progress paper is to describe our experience of generating this letter of advice and to comment on the patterns we identified during this process. This idea calls for more in-depth studies to reveal the influence of culture and geographic regions on the engineers' perceptions of their profession.