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The Graduate Research Identity Development program (GRID) is an initiative in the College of Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University, sponsored by the National Science Foundation since 2019. The program offers seminar-type lectures supplemented with activities designed to help graduate students develop critical skills for research-based careers. The program is focused on graduate engineering students but is open to graduate students from all programs. Students also choose mentors from within and outside the university with the goal of increasing their sense of belonging to the field and their identities as research engineers. As part of this program, a pilot study is in progress, aimed at performing a full-scale network analysis of student interactions. A web-based survey was administered to collect information about students in and outside the College of Engineering who participate in the GRID program sessions. The survey was designed to collect information on the relationship networks (or lack thereof) that students are involved in as they matriculate through their graduate program. It assesses things such as how and where the students interact with one another, members of faculty and staff, and with contacts from intramural and extramural organizations. Several items are also used to assess students’ perceptions of themselves as research engineers. In this paper, we focus on the interactions of students in the classroom. More specifically, we form networks based on the student answers about the classes they have taken in different departments. We then analyze the resultant networks and contrast certain graph theoretic properties to students’ scores on the research engineer identity items. Do students that are in the periphery, or students that have more connections attain higher research engineer identity scores? Do students that form complete subnetworks (cliques) or core-periphery structures (induced stars) have higher scores than others? This paper presents the findings from this pilot study from the network analysis on this cohort of students. In summary, we find that students with high eigenvector centrality scores and those who form larger cliques possess significantly higher research engineer identity scores. 

This paper reports on research that is part of a broader National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded, Innovations in Graduate Education (IGE) project. The project aims to enhance the research culture and broaden the participation in research of underrepresented groups within graduate engineering programs at a mid-sized historically black college or university. The project includes three initiatives that seek to assist in the development of a “research engineer identity” among the graduate students pursuing research-based degrees in the college. One of the three initiatives of the project, and focus of this paper, involves the development of a survey-based Research Engineer Identity Scale (REIS). A two stage sequential mixed-method research design is being used to develop the scale. This paper focuses on the first stage in the design which involved conducting focus groups with research engineers to gain insight into the content, character, and complications associated with internalizing a Research Engineer Identity (REI) in general and among people from underrepresented groups in particular. We report on four semi-structured focus groups that each lasted approximately 90 minutes in Fall 2019. Each focus group included about 6 to 9 faculty members, industry professionals, or graduate students who actively engaged in engineering research in the Southeastern United States. Focus group participants represented various academic disciplines within engineering as well as a range of demographic characteristics such as sex, race, ethnicity, and citizenship status. The focus group conversations were transcribed and transcriptions were entered into NVivo for coding and analysis. Inter-rater reliability procedures were used to ensure consistency of coding. This paper reports on the themes that emerged within the focus group discussions regarding what it means to “be a research engineer.” The findings describe similarities and differences across demographic characteristics in regard to the content, character, and complications associated with efforts to develop a Research Engineer Identity. The paper concludes by briefly describing the process that will be used to transform the emergent themes into pool of items to be included in a web-based questionnaire designed to measure Research Engineer Identity.