IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2017 - 52

are more (or better, different) strategies that we should be implementing. What we do know is that over
the ten years of the HESE program,
more than half of the students have
consistently been women. A third
of them go on to engineering graduate or medical school at some of
the best universities in the U.S. Others are working with the World Food
Program, the Clinton Health Access
Initiative, or starting social enterprises. They're pursuing careers where
they see the direct human impact of
their work. Though HESE is one academic program, at one university, it
represents a movement of universities building experiential engagement
programs that prioritize social impact.
Many of those programs are seeing
similar results, with balanced enrollment between men and women, if not
women outnumbering men.
By focusing on purpose, keeping
it real, emphasizing impact, building
an inclusive culture and inclusive
teams, promoting autonomy, enforcing rigor, creating an informal network, recruiting everyone, focusing on
skillsets and mindsets, and building
the foundations of careers, we attract
women to our program in strong numbers and believe these strategies
can be utilized by other universities
to bring women into engineering.
Finally, our students are very clear in
their motivations of participating in
HESE - to actually build sustainable
and scalable systems that live on,
take on a life of their own, and solve
problems for lots of people. Like students everywhere, they are challenging educators to build educational
and entrepreneurial ecosystems that
prepare them for impact-focused
careers. If we build it, they will come.

Further Reading
For more information about the
HESE program, our experiences with

52

References

multidisciplinary teams, and student experiences, please see the
following publications.
K. Mehta, S. Zappe, M. Brannon,
and Y. Zhao, An Educational and
Entrepreneurial Ecosystem to Actualize Technology-Based Social
Ventures (Special Issue), Advan-
ces in Engineering Education
o n Engineering Entrepreneurship
Education, vol. 5. no. 1. pp. 1-28,
Wint. 2016.
K. Liguori, M. Eckman, and K.
Mehta, "Reflections on multidisciplinary teamwork: From experience
to impact," Int. J. Service Learn-
ing in Engineering, Humanitarian
Engineering and Social Entrepre-
neurship (Special Edition on University Engineering Programs That
Impact Communities: Critical Analyses and Reflections), pp. 283-299,
Fall 2014.
R . D z o m b a k a nd K . Meh t a ,
"Scholarly advances in humanitarian engineering and social entrepreneurship: A typology of research
publications," Int. J. Service Learn-
ing in Engineering: Humanitarian
Engineering and Social Entrepre-
neurship (Special Edition), pp. 98-116,
Fall 2013.

[1] S. Ahlfeldt, S. Mehta, and T. Sellnow,
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[3] R. Dzombak, S. Mouakkad, and K.
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[4] R.J. Ely and D.A. Thomas, "Cultural
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[9] L. Nilsson, "How to attract female engineers," New York Times, 2015; http://
www.nytimes .com/2015/04/27/opinion/
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[10] J.R. Savery and T.M. Duffy, "Problem
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Author Information
Rachel Dzombak is a Postdoctoral
Researcher at the Blum Center for
Developing Economies and the Haas
School of Business, both at the University of California, Berkeley.
Khanjan Mehta is Vice Provost for
Creative Inquiry, Director of Mountaintop Initiative, at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA.
Mehta is the Founding Director of
the HESE Program at Penn State,
and led it until Dec 2016. Dzombak
was a student in the program for 3
years and worked for HESE after
graduation and before starting graduate school at UC Berkely.

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