Connections to research and professional practice are both essential components of engineering education, although handled differently across engineering programmes. The aim of this paper is to identify discourses on these components across three engineering programmes to in depth understand these variations. A discourse analysis was conducted on interviews, documents and observations and the results show three distinct discourses: the relevance and usefulness discourse, primarily emphasising engineering professional practice and connections to industry; the research and independence discourse, primarily accentuating research connections and independence from external actors; and the dual coupling and sustainability discourse, mainly highlighting a combination of connections to research and professional practice, along with a focus on sustainable development. The overall function of the discourses is interpreted as enhancing the particular characteristics of each programme and resisting different types of influences that threaten to undermine the characteristics of each programme.