West Orange grad, engineering professor, wins $500K grant

With the help of a $500,000 research grant, a 2001 West Orange High graduate is now engineering her way to help students realize their full potential and be successful.

Dr. Marisa Orr, a Winter Garden native and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Louisiana Tech University, is the recipient of the National Science Foundation’s five-year Early Career Development (CAREER) grant, one of the most prestigious to be awarded.

It was a tedious application process — and her second time applying — but after submitting a total of about 100 pages with all necessary forms, budgets and biography, Orr is on her way to researching methods on empowering students to make better decisions. 

She already does a lot of work looking at institutional data and how students progress through their curriculum in higher education, which is how she noticed that many students who come in and start a college engineering degree end up dropping out for academic reasons, but many of those never changed majors. Her current funded project, “Empowering Students to be Adaptive Decision-Makers,” will explore ways to assist engineering students nationwide in achieving their academic goals.

“I’m looking at whether we can find some early indicators that a student might end up that way, and if early on we can help them make an adaptive decision about finding whatever is the best fit for them so they can be successful,” Orr said. “Second, how do we actually convince them to change majors? There’s another theoretical framework behind that and how we can help them make their decisions.”

“Every decision we make — we’re all writing our story and how we tell it. By giving students an example story of someone who struggled before finding a successful pathway, that can help them rewrite their own story.”— Marisa Orr

The purpose of Orr’s research is to combat this issue by identifying strategic alternatives for students who may run into problems and understanding how students make their decisions. Even if one of the alternatives for a student is switching majors to find a better academic fit, it will put the student on the right track to success.

Another alternative in the works is creating an online interface academic dashboard where student can access tools, worksheets and checklists to help them with completing their curriculum and to get them to think about how they make their decisions.

“Every decision we make — we’re all writing our story and how we tell it,” Orr said. “By giving students an example story of someone who struggled before finding a successful pathway, that can help them rewrite their own story. I want to get students to think about their decisions, even just smaller, everyday decisions that ultimately help lead to their success.”

Over the next five years, Orr will be working diligently to collect data and map her theory to actual student behaviors, and said she is excited to develop that connection and build off of it to ultimately help struggling students find success.

“The first part of the project is one that I actually wanted to do as a graduate student, and also this is the first project I’ve had awarded funds for,” Orr said. “It’s a great relief to know that for the next five years, when I need to go for a conference and present my work or buy supplies, I don’t have to scrounge to pay for it. Now I can just focus on doing the research.”

Contact Danielle Hendrix at [email protected].