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The purpose of this work in progress paper is to share preliminary results and lessons learned from a pilot scale graduate student mentorship program being run in the spring of 2024. A wealth of research has demonstrated that LGBTQ+ individuals in engineering face a uniquely chilly environment rife with microaggressions, hypermasculine competitiveness, assumptions of heterosexuality, and overt homophobia. These experiences lead to a myriad of academic, health, and wellness issues for students and exert a pressure for all queer individuals to pass as cisgender and heterosexual to survive in the heteronormative environment of engineering. This is particularly salient for graduate students, who are in a key stage of professional development. As these students are socialized into the norms of their chosen field, they must contend with the ways these norms can be at odds with their LGBTQ+ identity. To counter this negative climate, we turn to mentorship programs, which have been shown to be highly effective for supporting minoritized students in STEM. Despite the evidence in support of mentorship programs for minoritized students, there are few programs described that focus specifically on LGBTQ+ students, and those that are reported focus on undergraduate students. To rectify this lack of programs, this paper serves as a scaffold for others to run similar mentorship programs at their home institution. We will discuss the logistics of running this program, the challenges and lessons learned, and ways in which a larger scale program can be approached. In this paper, we will also describe the impact this program had on both a student’s identity as a research scientist, and their overall perception of the climate in the engineering school at a large southern research institution. 

DEI programming in recent years has focused significant efforts on fostering inclusion of visible identities, such as race/ethnicity, certain dominant gender identities, and certain dominant forms of sexual orientation. However, there is a lack of understanding of how DEI programs can target people with multiple, possibly invisible, marginalized identities, such as asexuality. Furthermore, while DEI programs tend to provide valuable and necessary support spaces for students from marginalized backgrounds, they may not consider how marginalized students create their own resistance practices. In this paper, we explore the liminal space of invisible identity and its intersections with other identities through a case study of an asexual cis-gender woman undergraduate engineering student through the lens of transformational resistance and identity development. Through her narrative, we see how transformational resistance can occur at any part of the identity development process, though certain identities during these parts may not be salient or significant to the individual. This paper addresses the complexity in creating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) spaces for invisible marginalized identities and offers the experiences of the participant to question the bounds of inclusivity in these spaces. 

In this paper, we describe a queer engineering reading group comprised of undergraduate and graduate students and faculty members. Studies over the last decade have shown that LGBTQIA+ engineering students have continuously felt excluded and devalued in STEM spaces. A key factor in this chilly climate is the social-technical dualism that is often strictly enforced in engineering curriculum. Professors and students alike see discussing politics and social issues as irrelevant to the highly technical curriculum. As a result, queer identities are erased from engineering and students are never able to formally connect engineering with their queer (or other) identity in any meaningful way. In an effort to combat this, we have implemented a LGBTQIA+ reading group that challenges the depoliticizing culture of engineering and allows students to further connect to their engineering and queer identities. This reading group centers weekly discussions of relevant education and sociology literature about queer and/or STEM issues. Each week a different student summarizes the paper’s key concepts then facilitates group discussion where participants voice their personal connections to the themes of the paper. A wide variety of literature has been discussed, with a focus on the intersection of queer identity with other identities marginalized in STEM. Here we present the development and structure of the reading group and lessons learned over the course of the reading group offering in Fall 2020. Furthermore, we will explore the ways this group has helped augment queer engineering spaces and has served as a catalyst for student activism. Importantly, we have included student reflections of their experiences in the group and how the readings connect with their experiences as a queer engineering student.