Entrepreneurial Career Choice and Characteristics of Engineering and Business Students

This paper measures the entrepreneurial intent and related characteristics of engineering undergraduates, as compared with business students. The purpose of this study is to describe and test the difference on entrepreneurial intent and related characteristics for engineering and business students with different career goals for both genders. Data were collected through the Young Entrepreneurs Study (YES) survey, which included 518 engineering and 471 business undergraduates from multiple institutions. Analysis of Variance with Tukey-Kramer tests and independent samples t-tests with Bonferroni corrections were conducted to test for differences across groups. The results showed that starters (participants who stated starting an organization as their career goal) reported significantly higher scores than did joiners (participants who stated joining an organization as their career goal) in several entrepreneurship-related characteristics. Although business students were more likely to cite entrepreneurship as their career goal than were engineering students, engineering and business students who had the same career goals showed similar characteristics that were related to entrepreneurial intent. Women and men starters, regardless of discipline, have similar entrepreneurship-related characteristics; however, business men have higher entrepreneurial intent than do engineering women. With similar entrepreneurship-related characteristics among engineering and business starters, entrepreneurial courses and programs for engineering and business starters could be structured similarly. Perhaps these courses could be multidisciplinary, serving both engineering and business starters, although engineering students in these types of courses should be encouraged to have more confidence in communicating their ideas. Curricula might be designed such that some groups, such as engineering women, with less salient intentions, could easily access resources and tools to develop their ideas.