Investigating Best Practices In The Research Mentoring Of Underrepresented Minority Students In Engineering: The Impact Of Informal Interactions

This exploratory study addresses the need to increase the numbers of traditionally underrepresented minority (URM) students in engineering careers through an investigation of the role of research mentoring in recruiting and retaining URM students in engineering. Mentoring students in engineering and science research has long been acknowledged as an effective way to engage undergraduates in engineering majors, and is also an essential component of the doctoral degrees that represent the gateway to careers in engineering research. This study was guided by the following questions: 1) What can we identify as best practices in mentoring and supervising URM students as they conduct engineering research? 2) How is the effectiveness of these practices perceived by URM populations? 3) To what extent are these best practices in research mentoring congruent with commonly accepted guidelines for undergraduate and graduate students from majority groups? In order to answer these questions, data was collected through an online survey of a nationwide sample of URM engineering undergraduate students, graduate students, and recent PhD recipients. Semi-structured follow-up interviews were conducted by telephone with a sub-set of the survey respondents. Through coding and narrative analysis of qualitative data and triangulation with quantitative survey data, several themes emerged regarding the impacts of mentoring and students' perceptions of best practices in research mentoring. In this paper, we focus on one theme which stood out in the data: the role of informal mentoring by research supervisors in retaining undergraduate students in engineering. In this paper we describe what informal mentoring looks like in the context of engineering research experiences and how it has contributed to students` persistence in engineering. We also explore how informal mentoring may be particularly beneficial for URM students. We propose that incorporating more informal types of mentoring into the research mentor-mentee relationship is one effective way for faculty to facilitate the retention of URM undergraduate students in engineering.