Mentorship and Community in Engineering: a Case Study of Undergraduate Engagement in Research

Engaging undergraduate students in research is a critical responsibility of institutions of higher learning; a respon-sibility which has innumerable positive impacts on students and faculty alike. To effectively fulfill this responsibility, it is critical for experienced researchers to consider ways to engage under-graduate students in research fields. One established method of increasing undergraduate engagement is by pairing research mentors with undergraduate mentees. However, this approach requires a substantial time commitment from both the mentor and mentee and often impacts only one student at a time. A review of current literature suggests that to combat these pitfalls, experienced researchers could foster a cohort of undergraduate students in a research setting, as this may also effectively increase undergraduate's involvement in research. To further examine both of the aforementioned approaches, this work outlines a framework comprised of a model of mentorship and a set of adoptable practices for experienced research mentors to use when mentoring undergraduates. Additionally, this work examines a preliminary case study in which a graduate student employed this framework in the setting of an engineering research lab. In this instance, a graduate student acts as a mentor to a cohort of three undergraduate student mentees. To conduct preliminary assessment, autoethnographic reflections were collected from participants to be coded and analyzed for themes. In addition, any resources associated with implementation of the mentorship framework was also saved for illustration of the proposed prac-tices associated with the framework. This assessment has yielded promising results, as all three undergraduate student mentees have remained in the lab as active and effective team members. Furthermore, all three students felt that this experience positively impacted their personal and professional growth. In analyzing student reflections, these undergraduate students have reported an increased level of confidence in their technical abilities and a recognition of their importance to the community of engineering research.