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1. Developing Intrapreneurship in the Next Generation of Engineering Innovators and Leaders

   Dallas, Tim ; Greenhalgh-Spencer, Heather ; Frias, Kelli ( July 2021 , 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference)

   This S-STEM Project responds to a growing disparity among technology firms and the number of under-represented people in managerial and executive positions. Of particular interest is developing mentorship relationships and intrapreneurial competencies (i.e., entrepreneurship within established firms). Mentorship and increased skills preemptively aid in the retention and promotability of engineering undergraduates (upon entering the workforce). Specifically, the project was designed to produce electrical and computer engineering graduates with intrapreneurial knowledge and skills, which are characteristic of managers and innovators. Using the Intrepreneurial Competencies literature, the authors develop and test a multi-phased project among a diverse group of engineering undergraduates. The literature suggests enhancing intrapreneurial skills of students in engineering can be achieved through a combination of curricular and real-world experiences. Thus, this project incorporates faculty and industry mentorship, workforce development seminars, an industrial internship, entrepreneurship programs, and scholarships. Cohort 1 is comprised of a diverse group of 16 students (8 men, 8 women, 8 ethnic minorities). Students attended lectures by prominent engineering entrepreneurs, participated in a 3-day start-up weekend, attended engineering job fairs and two semesters of project-focused seminars, and read entrepreneurial and/or leadership-related books. Two primary data sets were collected utilizing a repeated measures design. Data were collected in the form of student reflections about being a mentee in the mentor relationships and interview data from mentors (i.e., engineering professionals). Students documented their mentoring sessions, which were reviewed by the project team. A primary theme that emerged from mentor reports was the effects of COVID-19, mostly how students felt about their coursework and how their industry mentors felt about their jobs. Although there was deep concern about the impacts of COVID-19, the students expressed a sense of growth and learning in spite of the virus. Students self-reported that the S-STEM experience was still highly beneficial, even as much of the coursework and mentoring for the latter half of the Spring semester had to be moved online. The students responded well, with the average semester GPA rising from 3.483 in the Fall to 3.774 in the Spring. Second, data were collected by survey pre- and post-semester to measure improvements in Intrapreneurial Competencies. The “Intrapreneurial Competencies Measurement Scale”(ICMS) by Vargas-Halabi et al. was used to measure and evaluate the development of intrapreneurial competencies, which include: (1) Opportunity promoter, (2) Proactivity, (3) Flexibility, (4) Drive, and (5) Risk taking. Each of the six categories of the ICMS is divided into 3-9 sub-categories to assess skill and mindset in the six general categories. In answering the questions on the ICMS test, students evaluated their proficiency in each of the areas. Growth was evident for almost all the categories and sub-categories across each of the three data-gathering points. 

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2. LSAMP Bridges to the Doctorate: Preparing Future Minority Ph.D. Researchers through a Holistic Graduate Student Development Model

   Gloster, C. ; McCullough, M. ; Gowdy, G. ; Bigsby, S. ; Whittington, D. ; Johnson-Taylor, J. ( June 2023 , ASEE annual conference proceedings)

   The importance of diversifying the national STEM workforce is well-established in the literature (Marrongelle, 2018). This need extends to graduate education in the STEM fields, leading N.C. A&T to invest considerably in graduate education and wraparound support initiatives that help graduate students build science identity and competencies for careers both within and beyond academia. The NSF-funded Bridges to the Doctorate project will integrate culturally reflective mentoring and professional development specifically designed for Black, Latinx, and Native American Ph.D. students. This holistic, graduate student development model includes academic and professional skill-building for STEM careers alongside targeted support for pursuing fellowship opportunities. This paper discusses the planned mentoring approach for the aforementioned program and previous approaches to mentoring graduate students used at N.C. A&T. The BD Fellows program will support formal and informal mentoring relationships, as mentoring contributes towards retention in STEM graduate programs (Ragins, 2007). BD Fellows will participate in monthly one-hour seminars on how to identify, establish, and maintain informal mentoring relationships (Schwartz et al., 2018; Parnes et al., 2020), while STEM faculty will attend seminars on leveraging their social networks as vital sources of mentorship for the BD Fellows. Using a multi-pronged collaborative approach, this model integrates the evidence-based domains of self-efficacy (Laurencelle & Scanlan, 2018; Lent et al., 1994; Lent et al., 2008), science/research identity (Lent et al., 2015; Zimmerman, 2000), and social cognitive career theory (Lent et al., 2005; Lent and Brown, 2006) to recruit, enroll, and graduate LSAMP Fellows with STEM doctoral degrees. Guided by the theories, the following questions will be addressed: (1) To what extent is culturally reflective mentoring identified as a critical driver of B2D Fellows’ success? (2) To what extent are the program’s training components fostering increases in B2D Fellow’s self-efficacy, competency, and science identity? (3) What is the strength of the correlation between participation in the program training components, mentoring activities, and persistence in graduate school? (4) To what extent does the perceived importance of self-efficacy, competency, and science identity differ by race/ethnicity and gender? These data will be analyzed using both formative and summative assessments of program outcomes. Quantitative data will include pre-, post-, and exit surveys. Qualitative data will assess the impact of mentoring and program support. This study will be guided by established protocols that have been approved by the N.C. A&T IRB. It is anticipated that our BD Fellows program will significantly impact the retention and graduation rates of underrepresented minority STEM graduate students in our doctoral programs, thus producing a diverse workforce of STEM professionals. Materials from the program recruiting cycle, mentoring workshops, and the structured fellowship application process will be disseminated freely to other LSAMP and minority-serving institutions across the country. Strategies and outcomes of this project will be published in peer-reviewed journals and shared in conference proceedings. 

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3. Recruiting and Retaining Low-Income Engineering Students Across Four Institutions During a Pandemic: Progress and Lessons Learned from a Track 3 S-STEM Grant

   Castles, R. ; Venters, C. ; and Goodman, C ( June 2022 , 2022 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition)

   In January 2020 East Carolina University (ECU) in partnership with Lenoir Community College (LCC), Pitt Community College (PCC), and Wayne Community College (WCC) was awarded an S-STEM Track 3 Grant (Grant number: 1930497). The purpose of this grant was to support low-income students at each partner institution, to research best practices in recruiting and retaining low-income students at both universities and community colleges, and to research how such programs influence the transfer outcomes from two-year to four-year schools. This grant provides scholarship support for two cohorts of students, one starting their engineering studies in Fall 2020 and the other starting their engineering studies in Fall 2021. Each cohort was to be comprised of 40 students including 20 students at ECU and 20 students divided among the three partnering community colleges. In addition to supporting student scholarships, this grant supported the establishment of new student support mechanisms and enhancement of existing support systems on each campus. This project involved the creation of a faculty mentoring program, designing a summer bridge program, establishing a textbook lending library, and enhancing activities for students in a living-learning community, expansion of university tutoring initiatives to allow access for community college students, and promoting a new peer mentoring initiative. The program emphasizes career opportunities including promoting on-campus career fairs, promoting internship and co-op opportunities, and bringing in guest speakers from various industry partners. A goal of the program was to allow community college students to build relationships with university students and faculty so they can more easily assimilate into the student body at the university upon transfer. This paper presents the challenges presented to the project in the first year and the pivoting that occurred due the pandemic. Data is presented regarding recruitment of scholars in both cohorts and retention of scholars from year 1 to year 2. 

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4. Making Meaning through Mentorship: A Student-Led Layered Peer Mentorship Program

   Howland Cummings, M. H. ; Schupbach, W. T. ; Altman, T. ; Jacobson, M. S. ; Goodman, K. ; Darbeheshti, M. ( January 2023 , ASEE)

   This Complete Evidence-Based Paper presents research about a layered peer mentorship program for undergraduate engineering students at a public urban research university and ways that students have made meaning from their mentorship experiences. This mentorship program began in Fall 2019 and has grown to include the following layers: (a) first-year students who receive mentorship, (b) sophomore- and junior-level students who serve as mentors (all of whom received mentorship during their first year), (c) junior- and senior-level students who serve as lead mentors who design the program for that academic year (including content, group meetings, service projects, meeting schedules, etc.), (d) a graduate student who mentors and supervises the lead mentors, and (e) a faculty member who oversees the overall program, provides general guidance, and advises all the students. We will describe ways in which the participating students have made meaning of their experience in the program, highlighting three key areas: (1) the web of relationships formed, which cohere into a community; (2) students’ transitions from receiving mentorship as first-year students to mentoring others in their sophomore and junior years; and (3) the feedback and iteration process by which the program has continuously developed, which forefronts student voice and agency. The paper will provide specific examples in each of the three key areas described, with a special focus on students’ own descriptions of the meaning they have made through their participation in the mentorship program. Recommendations will also be shared for those interested in implementing similar programs on their campuses. 

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5. Using collaborative autoethnography to investigate mentoring relationships for novice engineering education researchers

   https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-024-00473-8  

   Martin, Julie P. ; Suresh, Deepthi E. ; Jensen, Paul A. ( February 2024 , International Journal of STEM Education)

   The National Science Foundation Research Initiation in Engineering Formation (RIEF) program aims to increase research capacity in the field by providing funding for technical engineering faculty to learn to conduct engineering education research through mentorship by an experienced social science researcher. We use collaborative autoethnography to study the tripartite RIEF mentoring relationship between Julie, an experienced engineering education researcher, and two novice education researchers who have backgrounds in biomedical engineering—Paul, a biomedical engineering faculty member and major professor to the second novice, Deepthi, a graduate student. We ground our work in the cognitive apprenticeship model and Eby and colleagues’ mentoring model.

   Using data from written reflections and interviews, we explored the role of instrumental and psychosocial supports in our mentoring relationship. In particular, we noted how elements of cognitive apprenticeship such as scaffolding and gradual fading of instrumental supports helped Paul and Deepthi learn qualitative research skills that differed drastically from their biomedical engineering research expertise. We initially conceptualized our tripartite relationship as one where Julie mentored Paul and Paul subsequently mentored Deepthi. Ultimately, we realized that this model was unrealistic because Paul did not yet possess the social science research expertise to mentor another novice. As a result, we changed our model so that Julie mentored both Paul and Deepthi directly. While our mentoring relationship was overall very positive, it has included many moments of miscommunication and misunderstanding. We draw on Lent and Lopez’s idea of relation-inferred self-efficacy to explain some of these missed opportunities for communication and understanding.

   This paper contributes to the literature on engineering education capacity building by studying mentoring as a mechanism to support technically trained researchers in learning to conduct engineering education research. Our initial mentoring model failed to take into account how challenging it is for mentees to make the paradigm shift from technical engineering to social science research and how that would affect Paul’s ability to mentor Deepthi. Our experiences have implications for expanding research capacity because they raise practical and conceptual issues for experienced and novice engineering education researchers to consider as they form mentoring relationships.

    

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