Photo by Rahma Shere.
Do engineering students incline towards leadership differently on campus than they do out in the “real world”?
Undergraduate student Lobna El Gammal (ChemE 1T4) is conducting research that seeks to answer this question, with hopes of better connecting leadership development opportunities to students who participate in Professional Experience Year (PEY). In this story, ILead proudly shines the spotlight on El Gammal’s leadership research as part of National Engineering Month celebrations.
Under the supervision of ILead’s Prof. Doug Reeve (ChemE) and Research Associate Dr. Cindy Rottmann, El Gammal is surveying students who have completed PEY for her fourth-year thesis. She sees the opportunity to learn more about how her peers understand and incline towards leadership, as individuals who straddle academia and industry. El Gammal’s thesis project aims to identify these students’ leadership inclinations. Where ILead researchers studied full-time professionals out in the workforce, El Gammal brings the ELP closer to home by voicing student perspectives.
In her study, students participate in an online survey and receive a personalized profile about their leadership orientation at work and at school,. With their dual profiles, students can better understand how their behaviours and outlooks change depending on the context.
El Gammal hopes that her research with post-PEY students can shed light on how future engineers think about and enact leadership. Ultimately, she hopes it will encourage new curricula and professional development to benefit students, practicing engineers and the profession alike:
“The majority of current leadership teaching and development methods are not grounded in engineering students’ experiences. The Engineering Leadership Project, and this thesis focusing on post-PEY engineering students, may offer findings that can help tailor leadership programming for engineering students. As an engineering student myself, this is exciting and promising.”
For more information on this study, please contact Lobna El Gammal (lobna.elgammal@mail.utoronto.ca). You can also learn more about the ELP and ILead’s emerging model of engineering leadership.