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Although advising relationships are key for doctoral student success, little research has addressed how they form. Understanding the formation of advising relationships can help contextualize their later development and ultimately support a student’s decision to persist in the doctorate. To understand relationship formation, the purpose of this qualitative study is to identify and describe the types of advisor–advisee selection processes that exist in engineering, science, and math doctoral programs and examine patterns across disciplines within those fields. We conducted interviews with doctoral program directors and engaged in document analysis of graduate student handbooks from 55 doctoral programs in the aforementioned fields in high research institutions across the United States. Using principal–agent theory as a theoretical lens, our findings showed that engineering programs tend to decentralize the advisor selection process by funding students across different funding sources upon enrollment. Contrariwise, science and math programs tended to fund all students in a cohort from a common funding source, which allowed students to have more time to gather information, meet, and select an advisor. These findings also show important nuances when comparing graduate education in these programs that directly impact the doctoral student experience and reiterates the necessity to study these fields separately.

 

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.