Search for: All records

Engineering students are particularly interested in attaining internships prior to completing their undergraduate studies. It is generally acknowledged that internships provide critical insight into the nature and demands of engineering roles. However, pre-internship students tend to be apprehensive about how to prepare for the internship opportunity and how to excel when in the position. Students enrolled in a Scholarships in STEM (S-STEM) program have both a faculty mentor and an industry mentor, that are important components of a process to infuse intrapreneurial competencies (i.e., entrepreneurship within established firms), in addition to the discipline-specific knowledge and skills provided by an engineering education. The research presented in this paper analyzes data from the students’ perspectives as well as mentors’ perspectives to better understand how the mentoring experience shapes readiness for internships, as well as readiness for employment or further education. Our findings suggest that both students and mentors perceive the mentorship process to be highly beneficial. 

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.