forman integral part of graduate school in higher institutions as they serve as mentors, advisors, andexpert guides to graduate students during their academic journey. In many institutions, they alsoplay an integral part in determining who gets accepted into engineering graduate programs. Forthese reasons, we consider the perception of faculties to be an influential factor to be studied forthis research, as they are the central point of contact and decision-making for any graduatestudent. They are also a major support system to graduate students and play a pivotal role insteering their academic and professional journey. The role of faculty goes beyond providingacademic guidance; they also assist with funding opportunities, mentor students
challenges [2], and interdisciplinary students in particularmay benefit from guidance beyond what is provided by their primary research supervisor [7].Interdisciplinary graduate degree programs may serve their students well by offering exposure todiverse career and disciplinary research settings, and to provide structures that prompt students toinvestigate and reflect upon these options. For instance, an expanded mentorship group is oftenencouraged for graduate students, but is often presented as a selection of faculty members withintheir degree program and institution [3]. However, students entering highly interdisciplinarygraduate programs may need additional mentors outside of their home degree program, as wellas support that helps them integrate
development of effective advising relationships [12].Although significant research has explored faculty experiences within the advising relationshipand the obstacles that prevent engagement in advising, little research discusses the supports thatpromote and the barriers that prevent faculty from developing and adopting student- centered[13, 14] advising practices that meet both student and faculty members’ personal needs.Research on graduate advising has typically taken a unilateral approach, focusing eitherexplicitly on the promotion of student success outcomes [15-19] or faculty productivity [20-22].Little work has focused on leveraging advising as a mutually beneficial activity that can createvalue for both faculty and students. To breach this
from a variety ofuniversities was used to obtain data regarding many aspects of the master's program process. Forthis paper, the questions regarding the decision to attend graduate school were isolated andexamined using standard statistical methods. From these statistical tests, we were able to obtainresults which help us understand how priorities differ between these two student groups and mayaid universities in their recruitment of graduate students from both backgrounds.IntroductionThe decision to pursue a master’s degree is life-altering for an engineer. It changes the trajectoryof one’s career and can open many doors. However, pursuing a master’s degree is not an easyprocess and requires significant commitment. Many factors contribute to
on two broad areas: achievement/retention in STEM and comprehension of illus- trated scientific textDr. Karin Jensen, University of Michigan Karin Jensen, Ph.D. (she/her) is an assistant professor in biomedical engineering and engineering edu- cation research at the University of Michigan. Her research interests include student mental health and wellness, engineering student career pathways, and engagement of engineering faculty in engineering education research.Dale RobbennoltAnne Hart, University of Tennessee, Memphis ©American Society for Engineering Education, 2023 Work in Progress: Exploring the Landscape of Stressors Experienced by Doctoral Engineering
within academic structures such as departmental siloing andconflicts in policies, procedures, and budget models across disciplines that often impinge uponinterdisciplinary student development [1][2][3].Previous findings based on faculty perspectives on facilitating interdisciplinary programs revealthe ways in which multiple differentiated layers of the academic environment impact graduatestudent development, but students’ perspectives have often been left out, leaving an incompletepicture. Additionally, existing literature tends to focus on levels of the academic environmentthat students interact with directly, with less attention to external influences at or beyond theinstitutional level that are also relevant to the interdisciplinary graduate
theory and facilitating interdisciplinary graduate programs; the identity development and experiences of interdisciplinary engineering graduate students and faculty; and the decision-making processes and factors impacting implementation of interdisciplinary graduate education initiatives. She works as a graduate research assistant for the Virginia Tech Disaster Resilience and Risk Management interdisciplinary graduate program, as well as for the VT Center for Refugee, Migrant, and Displacement Studies.Dr. Marie C. Paretti, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Marie C. Paretti is a Professor of Engineering Education at Virginia Tech, where she directs the Virginia Tech Engineering Communications Center
personal connections they may notshare with a more senior mentor. Near-peer mentors are often perceived as more in tune with thestruggles of their mentees [1] and more approachable than an individual who identifies as an“expert” scientist [2]. Examples of near-peer mentoring relationships in academia include anupper-level student and a first-year student, an undergraduate student and a graduate student, or agraduate student and a new faculty member. Near-peer mentoring can positively affect both the mentor and the mentee. Studentmentees have stated that they feel more comfortable asking a near-peer mentor for academic helpthan they do a professor [3] and believe access to near-peer mentors promotes success in theircoursework [4]. Students
forthe sake of the institution’s reputation, the desire to protect their most prolific and well-knownscientists, and the fear of being sued by the targets of bullying” 31 . Furthermore, the kind of negativerelationship between PhD student and advisor discussed in Narrative 3 can be a major contributingfactor to a students’ decision to either leave the PhD program or to complete the PhD programbut abandon a faculty career 32 . A 2018 Nature editiorial stated “[we] will never know how manypromising scientific careers around the world have been brought to a premature end because youngresearchers felt they could not continue to work under a bullying senior figure” 33 . Another author of this work had a very similar experience in their previous
not to answer/Others 2 0 0 0Note: 1East Asian includes Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc.; 2South Asian includes Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi,Sri Lankan, etc.; 3Fellowship/scholarship/grant indicates gifted monetary award that students do not need to repay;4 Self funded indicates personal finances and/or savings; 5Student loans indicate money borrowed from a financialinstitution that must be repaid; 6Others include money borrowed from family/friend with an expectation to repay orfrom parents, and foreign (non-U.S.) support.Data Analysis The first goal of this study—To understand similarities or differences in the student’sidentified stressors between engineering graduate student
; domestic students organizational part of a group of life or its graduate students who members' provide each other with perception of academic support and/or and attitudes encouragement. towards those dimensions"Institutional 4 dimensions: motivation: bouncing ideas off each engineering alumni and no mixed: [63]climate" historical, mastery climate; other; support from current grad students interviews structural, faculty & peers
of president appointed members. The two-party system in the USmeans that with a change in administration, the decision of graduate students as employees alsochanges. Most recently, the National Labor Relations Board has decided that graduate students atprivate institutions are in fact employees and deserve all the rights that employees in the US areentitled to, including unionization [20]. For graduate students at public universities,determination of graduate student workers as employees is left up to state legislature and/or theuniversity depending on how the state law is written. Sometimes state legislature will allowuniversities themselves to classify graduate student workers and other times, the state legislaturewill explicitly exclude
and industries, and employs an iterativeimprovement process to evaluate knowledge gained and promote effective communication and collab-oration. The primary goal is to equip graduate students with interdisciplinary skills and knowledge toprepare them for a diverse and dynamic workforce.Co-creation has been explored as a means of enhancing educational outcomes [2]. This approach aimsto transform the traditional view of students as passive consumers of education to active participantsin the learning and decision-making process [3]. The key features of this concept are collaboration inboth the process and output, transformative interaction, learner empowerment, a sense of communityand partnership in learning, and value. These findings are
University of Florida, 2George Mason UniversityAbstractA metacognitive approach to engineering education, including inquiry-based collaboration, canimpact and prepare STEM graduates for a modern workforce that requires high levels of criticalthinking, problem-solving, and decision-making skills. This exploratory study examinedgraduate STEM students’ perceived metacognition as they worked together to develop andimplement applied research in both online and in-person learning environments. It developed andimplemented online learning modules for four graduate engineering courses for researchquestion development, literature reviews, and conducting research. Students self-evaluated usinga survey at the end of each course. For all course sections and
. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. Her primary areas of research include engineering ca- reer pathways and decision-making, undergraduate student persistence, professional engineering practice, and faculty mentorship. Brunhaver graduated with her B.S. in mechanical engineering from Northeastern University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. ©American Society for Engineering Education, 2023 Perceived Advisor Support and Thesis Self-Efficacy: An Instrument DevelopmentAbstractThe path to degree completion for graduate students in engineering disciplines is fraught withchallenges, but one factor that
vulnerable to equating productivity with self-worth—is particularly relevant, as theseself-beliefs directly reinforce behaviors that can either help (i.e., help-seeking, proactive goalsetting, skill-acquisition) or hinder (i.e., social withdrawal, engaging in avoidant behavior,lowered aspirations) personal advancement and career prospects [6]. In this capacity, self-efficacy was identified as an emergent theme and subsequently coded for in the data.The academic pipeline and graduate student attritionThe path through graduate school is neither straightforward nor logical, with many pushes andpulls that may advantage some and disadvantage others. Despite the depoliticization culture andsocialization of engineering particularly among the STEM
. universities on 2,966 individual faculty assistantprofessors in science and engineering who were hired since 1990 [4]. Results showed that theretention probability of any given faculty member in science and engineering departments overtime was less than 50% [4]. Additionally, the median departure time was 10.9 years after enteringthe academic workforce as an assistant professor [4]. Due to the declining trend that U.S,- trainedPh.Ds. are less likely to secure a faculty position, universities began to collect data on the careeroutcomes and started assisting science and engineering graduate students in obtaining internshipand networking opportunities [3].Out of the instruments reported in the literature around workforce skills development, The GlobalSet
could be made more explicit and potentially broadened to include a wider rangeof communication styles and ways of being.We envision any departmental reform process, qualifying exams and beyond, to be a collaborativeone with faculty working alongside students. The Carnegie Foundation’s book, “The Formationof Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century” explores manyavenues of growth for higher education. One of their key highlights is the importance of studentinvolvement in evolving an educational program. Students are “the secret weapon for change”,and they found that when faculty were asked to work alongside students while reforming theirprograms, the faculty’s most transformative
promising findings of this research and the encouraging feedback of the student community motivated him to pursue this line of research in his NSF CAREER award in 2017. Since then, he has built a coalition within the university to expand this work through multiple NSF-funded research grants including IUSE/PFE: RED titled ”Innovation Beyond Accommodation: Leveraging Neurodiversity for Engineering Innovation”. Because of the importance of neurodiversity at all levels of education, he expanded his work to graduate STEM education through an NSF IGE grant. In addition, he recently received his Mid-CAREER award through which, in a radically novel approach, he will take on ambitious, transdisciplinary research integrating
research laboratories and focus on documenting learningprocesses as they unfold during daily practices in the laboratories. Specifically,the goal of our study is to observe and document how graduate students, and otherlab members, learn from one another within the cultural space of the laboratory,and what aspects of laboratory culture facilitate and what impede learning. To thatend, we use cognitive ethnography, an ethnographic approach combined withcognitive science to study cognitive processes through participant-observation oftwo engineering research laboratories. We identified the following themespertaining to learning experiences: scaffolding (structured activities orapprenticeship), peer-to-peer learning, self-directed and self-regulated
campaigns for all SHPE members and connections with faculty and currentgraduate students were also used to spread the word.Fig. 1, shown on the next page, is an example of a LinkedIn post that was created. It was sharedmainly by SHPE staff that have connections with those noted as candidates for both mentors andmentees.The majority of participants heard about the program through personalized mail merge emails.All mentee candidates that could be supported were accepted. Only one was declined due to thetiming of when that applicant was planning to apply to graduate school. A wait list was createdfor those mentee applicants that the program did not have enough mentors to accommodate, andthose applicants were the first invited to participate in the
DaytonDr. Gul G¨ul E. Kremer received her PhD from the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering of Missouri University of Science & Technology. Her research interests include multi-criteria decision analysis methods applied to improvement of products and systems. She is a senior member of IIE, a fellow of ASME, a former Fulbright scholar and NRC Faculty Fellow. Her recent research focus includes sustainable product design and enhancing creativity in engineering design settings.Prof. Nigel Forest Reuel, Iowa State University of Science and TechnologyDr. Ann M Gansemer-Topf, Iowa State University of Science and Technology Ann Gansemer-Topf is a Professor in Higher Education and Student Affairs and
other scenarios, the faculty member ismuch more involved, makes more of the decisions, and thus relies on the graduate student toserve more as the “messenger” or supervisor of the work assigned by the faculty member. In thefollowing sections we situate our study on the role of graduate students in undergraduateresearch mentoring by providing background context on undergraduate research mentoring andmentoring triads including an overview of typical research mentoring models, including triads,frequently described in the literature.Undergraduate research mentoring. There are many forms of undergraduate researchexperiences (UREs) in which mentorship is provided. These categories include but are notlimited to course-based undergraduate research
channels. E-mentoring can be beneficial for graduate students who may not have easy access to mentors in person. 6. Reverse Mentoring: In this type of mentoring relationship, the mentee takes on a mentoring role for the mentor. This can be useful when the mentor is seeking to learn more about the experiences and perspectives of the mentee, such as when a senior faculty member mentors a graduate student from a diverse cultural background.There are several types of mentoring relationships that can be used to support graduatestudents in STEM fields. Each type has its own advantages and can be used in differentsituations depending on the needs of the mentee and the goals of the mentoring relationship.Components for successThere
to receiving NSF funding, the researchers piloted the journey mapping methodologywith a small group (n=8) of doctoral students attending a summer seminar in June 2021 at aResearch-Intensive state university in the Southwest United States (#IRB2019-58). Doctoralstudents in two graduate engineering programs housed within the same department were invitedto participate. (The course in which the research was conducted is required for one of the degreeswhile students in the second doctoral program may take the course as an elective.) After studentswere informed of the research goals and methods, they were asked for consent to participate.After they consented, one researcher, who is not a member of the students’ program or thedepartment in which
faculty members atLehigh recognized that the existing doctoral training was not aligned with the expectations oflikely employers. Earlier, the senior author of this article was sensitized by a remark from theExecutive Vice President of a major company that ‘you have very smart kids coming out of Lehighbut they don’t think like us’. Feedback like this motivated us to think of a solution to this systemicproblem of STEM doctoral education. Our various experiences led us to redesign the STEM PhDmodel to one that would be student-centric and based on use-inspired research. The basic modelwas then proposed for support from NSF’s Innovation in Graduate Education Program fordeveloping it further and testing in practice. The details of the model, now
Faculty En- dowed Award and is consistently motivated by the distinction of her University of the West Indies Most All-Round Social Policy Student award. Dr Benjamin is a previous New York City Teaching Fellow and an inaugural member of the American Society for Engineering Education Post-Doctoral E-Fellowship. Through her scholarship, she explores matters related to minoritized student experiences, doctoral educa- tion, and engineering education with an educational philosophy that equates quality with equity. Dr Ben- jamin is committed to transforming educational systems into more inclusive, equitable and just spaces that adequately support learners – particularly those who have been historically and intentionally
seminar seriesdeveloped to assist Ph.D. students and postdoctoral scholars with applying and interviewing foracademic positions. The seminar series, Seminar on Entering Academia (SEA), was offeredwithin the College of Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University to provide students withan opportunity for professional development to assist in their pursuit of faculty positions.Anecdotally, many Ph.D. students at this institution begin their careers with academia in mind.However, while the individual graduate programs in the college provide students with excellenttechnical training, Ph.D. students and postdocs receive little to no formal training on how toprepare for an academic position or how to approach the academic job market. This lack
leadership and policy decision makers. NRT trainees and faculty visited with keylegislators and policy-making groups about water governance/water policy in Kansas. In spring2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 NRT trainees met with legislatures and policy-making groups aboutwater governance and policy in Kansas. NRT trainees were prepared to this activity during NRTSeminar where they had an overview of the state legislature and received tips on how tocommunicate with the legislators.To explore different career pathways and to create a professional community, the NRTleadership team established a team-based faculty and peer mentoring to provide vocationalcounseling and career planning for NRT trainee to pursue industry, government, and academiapositions and