Who am I as an Engineer? An Indian or an American?

Acquired skills: Literature Review, Self-initiated research, Academic writing

As an undergraduate researcher for the DeBoer Lab, I had the opportunity to lead research on engineering styles and philosophies by conducting a comparative literature review between Indian ethno-engineering and American engineering to identify their similarities and differences. This research was part of a wider autoethnography approach to deeply comprehend and analyze my experiences of studying in colonial and postcolonial countries, unpacking the power structures of the curricula I was exposed to. The aim of the autoethnographic research was to identify inequities in current engineering education, advocating for diverse perspectives.

The comparative literature review was motivated by my personal experiences as an international student of Indian origin studying at an American university, where I had to reconcile between the differences of ethno-engineering examples that I witnessed growing up, with the engineering examples that I was learning at Purdue. I also noticed the lack of representation of diverse engineering methodologies within my engineering education.

The examples of the two engineering styles derive from the literature review and my personal experiences. Given the lack of concrete definitions of “ethno-engineering”, several inclusion and exclusion terms were used to identify academic papers that illustrated examples of Indian ethno-engineering. Several rounds of inductive coding was performed to analyze the collated data, distilling to categories and themes of each engineering style.

To get to know more about the literature review and my findings, please find my writing below: