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The purpose of this work in progress paper is to share preliminary results and lessons learned from a pilot scale graduate student mentorship program being run in the spring of 2024. A wealth of research has demonstrated that LGBTQ+ individuals in engineering face a uniquely chilly environment rife with microaggressions, hypermasculine competitiveness, assumptions of heterosexuality, and overt homophobia. These experiences lead to a myriad of academic, health, and wellness issues for students and exert a pressure for all queer individuals to pass as cisgender and heterosexual to survive in the heteronormative environment of engineering. This is particularly salient for graduate students, who are in a key stage of professional development. As these students are socialized into the norms of their chosen field, they must contend with the ways these norms can be at odds with their LGBTQ+ identity. To counter this negative climate, we turn to mentorship programs, which have been shown to be highly effective for supporting minoritized students in STEM. Despite the evidence in support of mentorship programs for minoritized students, there are few programs described that focus specifically on LGBTQ+ students, and those that are reported focus on undergraduate students. To rectify this lack of programs, this paper serves as a scaffold for others to run similar mentorship programs at their home institution. We will discuss the logistics of running this program, the challenges and lessons learned, and ways in which a larger scale program can be approached. In this paper, we will also describe the impact this program had on both a student’s identity as a research scientist, and their overall perception of the climate in the engineering school at a large southern research institution.
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Choosing Where to Pursue a PhD: Ideals Sought and Compromises Made by Traditionally Minoritized Students
In this Research Full Paper we explore the factors that traditionally minoritized students consider when selecting a graduate school to pursue a doctoral degree in an engineering discipline. To this end, we used case study methods to analyze the experiences of ten traditionally minoritized students through interviews conducted immediately after they had selected their graduate programs, but before they had commenced their studies. Our findings show that in choosing an institution, the most salient ideals these students hold are related to the offer of funding towards their degree and an alignment with their initial research interests. However, they described having made compromises on ideals related to their personal experience and racial identity, the most prominent being finding a faculty mentor with a similar racial background, finding a racially diverse institution, or being located in a geographical location they perceived to be more amenable to their individual identities. These findings suggest that continuing to increase the recruitment of traditionally minoritized faculty in engineering schools would have a direct impact on minoritized student recruitment, by thus helping to create spaces where more of their racial identity ideals are met and fewer compromises are made. Equally important to the recruitment of traditionally minoritized students is the transparency of funding opportunities during the recruitment and application processes, and the publication of current research opportunities within the institution.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2029796
- PAR ID:
- 10388115
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 IEEE FIE
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 7
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The purpose of this work in progress paper is to share preliminary results and lessons learned from a pilot scale graduate student mentorship program being run in the spring of 2024. A wealth of research has demonstrated that LGBTQ+ individuals in engineering face a uniquely chilly environment rife with microaggressions, hypermasculine competitiveness, assumptions of heterosexuality, and overt homophobia. These experiences lead to a myriad of academic, health, and wellness issues for students and exert a pressure for all queer individuals to pass as cisgender and heterosexual to survive in the heteronormative environment of engineering. This is particularly salient for graduate students, who are in a key stage of professional development. As these students are socialized into the norms of their chosen field, they must contend with the ways these norms can be at odds with their LGBTQ+ identity. To counter this negative climate, we turn to mentorship programs, which have been shown to be highly effective for supporting minoritized students in STEM. Despite the evidence in support of mentorship programs for minoritized students, there are few programs described that focus specifically on LGBTQ+ students, and those that are reported focus on undergraduate students. To rectify this lack of programs, this paper serves as a scaffold for others to run similar mentorship programs at their home institution. We will discuss the logistics of running this program, the challenges and lessons learned, and ways in which a larger scale program can be approached. In this paper, we will also describe the impact this program had on both a student’s identity as a research scientist, and their overall perception of the climate in the engineering school at a large southern research institution.more » « less
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The Rising Engineering Education Faculty Experience program (REEFE) is a professional development program that connects graduate students in engineering education with faculty members at teaching-focused institutions. The program goal is to simultaneously support faculty growth in engineering education and graduate student growth as academic change agents. Our program has transitioned from a partnership between one engineering education graduate program and one engineering institution to a consortium of engineering education graduate programs that sends students to multiple institutions across the country. The REEFE Consortium also developed a unique partnership with the Making Academic Change Happen initiative to offer continuous training to graduate students during their REEFE experience. Many positive outcomes have come from the development of the REEFE Consortium, including better graduate training in research at the coordinating institution, a better understanding of program logistics, and new and strengthened professional relationships. We discovered a number of challenges associated with providing intensive professional development opportunities to graduate students, including timing of experiences relative to degree progress, loss of connection to the home research community, and financial impact, especially as it relates to travel and housing. While a search of existing literature in professional development in higher education has provided best practices for existing programs, there is little to no available research highlighting barriers that exist to offering different types of professional development opportunities to graduate student populations. These barriers are important to highlight as they provide critical information needed in the design and decision making for those seeking to create useful professional development opportunities for graduate populations. This paper provides an updated description of the Rising Engineering Education Faculty Experience program as we attempt to scale the program. We summarize the existing literature on barriers to participation in professional development opportunities for graduate students. Finally, we describe how REEFE both addresses and fails to address these barriers.more » « less
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Abstract BackgroundDespite many initiatives to improve graduate student and faculty diversity in engineering, there has been little or no change in the percentage of people from racially minoritized backgrounds in either of these groups. Purpose/HypothesisThe purpose of this paper is to counter the scarcity fallacy, in which institutions blame the “shortage” of qualified people from traditionally marginalized backgrounds for their own lack of representation, related to prospective PhD students and prospective faculty from traditionally marginalized groups. This study identifies the BS‐to‐PhD and PhD‐to‐tenure‐track‐faculty institutional pathways of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino engineering doctorate recipients. Design/MethodUsing the US Survey of Earned Doctorates, we tracked the BS‐to‐PhD institutional pathways of 3952 Black/African American and 5732 Hispanic/Latino engineering PhD graduates. We also used the Survey of Doctorate Recipients to track the PhD‐to‐tenure‐track faculty pathways of 104 Black/African American and 211 Hispanic/Latino faculty. ResultsThe majority of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino PhD graduates in this study did not earn their BS degrees from Top 25 institutions, but rather from Not Top 25, non‐US, and minority‐serving institutions. The results also show the relatively small proportion of PhD earners and faculty members who move into highly ranked institutions after earning a bachelor's degree from outside this set of institutions. ConclusionsThe findings of this study have important implications for graduate student and faculty recruitment by illustrating that recruitment from a narrow range of institutions (i.e., Top 25 institutions) is unlikely to result in increased diversity among racially minoritized PhDs and faculty in engineering.more » « less
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962571
