Turkish Students' Career Choices in Engineering: Experiences from Turkey

The shortfall of young people, particularly women, in the field of Science, Mathematics and Engineering (SME) has been shown in many national studies. Schreiner and Sjoberg (2007) indicated that boys outnumber girls in physics and engineering studies, while the gender balance is shifted towards the girls in studies including medicine, veterinary medicine, environmental science and biology. This paper sets out to explore the issues, which are relevant to understanding these gender differences and the factors affecting students' career choices. The instrument called "Vilje-con-valg" was used to obtain data from 1635 first year students from eight different departments--mechanical, civil, computer, electrical-electronics, industrial, chemical, environmental and food engineering at 21 universities in Turkey. The results of this study showed that (i) most of the students decided on career options during their last grade level in high school or after graduation from high school, (ii) students were influenced by the jobs that they were interested in; their talents and abilities that they wanted to use and job prospects after graduation, (iii) internet, popular scientific magazines, books and movies were important factors in choosing their careers and (iv) the creativity and independence in the jobs are important considerations that influence career decisions. (Contains 7 tables and 1 figure.)