Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the mentoring program of the Minority Scholars from Under-Represented Groups in Engineering and the Social Sciences (SURGE) Capacity in Disasters initiative, a pilot program that aimed to address the challenges that graduate students of color face in academic programs. SURGE promotes mentoring and professional development through its mentoring program for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) students.
Methods: Data collection involved distributing online surveys designed in Qualtrics to mentors and mentees five months after the SURGE program’s initiation. Separate surveys were created for student mentees and faculty mentors in order to collect feedback about the mentoring program. Mentees and mentors were also asked to rate their satisfaction with the specific individuals in their mentoring network so that the evaluation team could identify issues that arose across participants.
Results: We found that students had several motivations for and expectations from SURGE. A majority of the students found the SURGE mentoring program to have been at least somewhat valuable in helping them achieve these expectations. Nonetheless, students did identify a few challenges, namely lack of swift responsiveness from some mentors, not enough guidance on navigating the mentor-mentee relationship, and little to no in-person interaction. While half of the students mentioned that some individuals within their mentoring team were hard to reach, a majority remained satisfied with the overall responsiveness of their mentors. This suggests that the many-to-many mentoring model helped to ensure none were entirely dissatisfied on this measure.
Conclusions: These findings support previous research and show promise for mentoring as an effective intervention to the challenges that underrepresented students face in their academic programs and for their retention and representation, particularly in hazards and disaster-related fields.
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Graduate student peer mentoring experiences as a component of a multi-faceted graduate teacher training program
Peer mentoring programs are one approach to improving the pedagogical development of mathematical sciences graduate students. This paper describes the peer mentoring experiences at three institutions that have implemented a multi-faceted GTA professional development program. Data was collected from surveys and focus groups conducted with graduate teaching assistants at each institution regarding mentees’ ratings of their mentors, mentors’ ratings of their impact on mentees, mentors’ impressions of the benefits and challenges of peer mentoring, and mentees and mentors’ ratings of program components related to support from mentors, their TA coach, program staff, and other graduate students. Most GTAs found value in participating in the peer mentoring program. While the mentees found their mentors to be significant to their own success and effectiveness, the mentors did not rate themselves as high as the mentees rated them with respect to their own significance in impacting the effectiveness of their mentee.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1821619
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10294751
- Editor(s):
- Karunakaran, S. S.; Higgins, A.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2021 Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education Reports
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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