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Post-secondary students benefit from mentorships, which provide both emotional and academic support tailored to the unique challenges they face. STEM students, and, in particular, those with historically marginalized identities, have unique strengths and face distinct barriers that can be ameliorated by careful, knowledgeable, and well-situated mentoring relationships. With that in mind, we conducted a narrative case study with 10 rural-Appalachian STEM majors enrolled in an NSF-funded mentoring program, intending to collect stories of their impactful experiences with their mentors. We utilized the narrative reconstruction process, and, in so doing, identified five major themes related to the importance of mentor assignment and the impact of mentors’ characteristics and skills related to empathy, consistency, active listening, and teaching. We situate our findings within the existing literature and provide implications for scholars and practitioners who work with mentoring programs dedicated to working with Appalachian communities. 

Students from rural Appalachian regions often face increased career development barriers within university spaces. As part of an NSF-funded program, we provided diverse, structured supports for a group of STEM majors from rural Appalachian backgrounds. We utilized narrative inquiry to interview 10 Program participants, which allowed us to explore which supports they described as impactful, including graduate student mentors, their fellow program peers, program coordinators, campus supports, and other various campus faculty. Participants further described being impacted in a variety of ways: as an individual person, in their research pursuits, in their future plans, academically, and financially through the program’s scholarship. Specifically, they described strategies for success and the importance of belonging as impactful. Implications for future college support programming and for how to best support the career development of rural Appalachian college students, along with suggestions for future research needs and limitations to the research, are provided.