CIVIL ENGINEERING

CIVIL ENGINEERING

GARCIA NAMED 2022 NSF GRADUATE FELLOW

Ulises Trujillo Garcia

Senior civil engineering student Ulises Trujillo Garcia’s fellowship-supported research project focuses on discovering the impacts of exposure to personal narratives in the classroom. The goal is to ascertain if personal stories in the classroom can help underrepresented students in engineering fields develop a greater sense of belonging and identity as an engineer. Research highlights a positive connection with students’ sense of belonging to an engineering community that is shown to improve retention, academic success, and other important outcomes. Garcia’s research comes from firsthand experiences as a first-generation, low-income, Latino engineering student building an inspiration to help other underrepresented students have successful, connected engineering journeys. “My background from a migrant farm-working family has given me a passion for helping and supporting underrepresented students in engineering,” Garcia said. “This will equip me to work on my lifelong commitment to improving underrepresented students’ graduation and retention rates by focusing on mechanisms to transform representation in engineering, which will directly impact the educational outcomes of the most vulnerable students in the country.” Garcia graduated from Boise State with a bachelor’s of science in civil engineering this spring. He will be attending Arizona State University to join the doctoral program in Engineering Education Systems after receiving four full-ride offers.