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Increases in the representation of Black and Latiné students in doctoral engineering programs over the past decades have not yet led to long-term success in achieving parity with the population's demographics. Although graduation rates show such students are recruited to such programs, they remain underrepresented due to their early departure due to unreconcilable differences in institutional cultures being exclusive of their identities. Although the socialization experiences of first-year doctoral students can predetermine their success or failure, scant research has looked at Black and Latiné students in engineering programs. This longitudinal qualitative case study explores the first-year program experiences of such students and how their minority identities influenced theirsocialization. We present the experiences of sixteen engineering graduate students from variousinstitutions who met in virtual focus groups throughout their first year. We found that Black and Latiné students' racial-ethnic identities influence how they experience the first year of their doctorate.This influence extends from how they perceive their sense of belonging and qualification to be in such programs to how and where they seek support when facing racialized experiences. Moreover, participants shared how their programs were not equipped to support their identities and potential contributions to their fields. These findings are key to the engineering context, where representation is starkly limited for these students. Our implications for institutions focus on the needed cultural shifts to ultimately diminish the barriers that Black and Latiné students face while pursuing doctoraldegrees. 

Mentors are key to the academic success of engineering graduate students, and particularly historicallymarginalized graduate students. To continue to enhance and improve mentoring experiences in order to support minoritized students to persist in their doctoral degrees, it is important to understand who is mentoring minoritized students regarding enrollment in doctoral programs and what expectations these students have for mentoring in graduate school. We used interviews and focus groups to explore who students cite as mentors and who they expect to fill this role once entering the doctoral pursuit. We used a theoretical framework organized around different support and challenge roles that dissertation advisors might play to understand the different roles these mentors played. We found various roles in which a variety of mentors influence minoritized students enrolling in doctoral programs, including family, informal undergraduate mentors, and peers, as those who support their decision to enroll. Our findings also detail the expectations of rising minoritized students for future advisors. 

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.