Impact and Mediating Mechanisms of a Co-Curricular Community-Based Professional Mentoring Program on Undergraduate Engineering Student Persistence and Career Readiness

About This Grant

This project aims to serve the national interest by enhancing career readiness and persistence of undergraduate engineering students through structured mentorship from working professionals in the field. Recognizing that employers desire entry-level engineers who possess both technical and non-technical competencies, this project addresses persistent gaps in professional skills such as communication, teamwork, and professionalism. This Level 1 Engaged Student Learning project plans to develop and evaluate a novel mentoring approach that prioritizes the development of soft skills and perceived career-readiness among engineering students. The project intends to build upon an existing successful mentoring strategy for undergraduate business students by adapting and customizing that model to meet the needs of engineering students. The adapted mentoring strategy will focus on critical workplace competencies such as professionalism, communication, teamwork, and leadership while assessing the effectiveness of professional mentors compared to traditional academic support. By integrating community-based professionals into undergraduate STEM education, the project seeks to contribute to national efforts to strengthen workforce readiness and increase stakeholder engagement in engineering education. The project aims to develop an adaptable and scalable mentoring strategy that can be readily implemented across institutions and disciplines for the co-curricular development of career competencies. The first project goal aims to investigate how a mentoring strategy using workplace professionals impacts undergraduate engineering students' career competencies, career readiness, intent to persist in engineering, academic performance, and attainment of internships and satisfaction with post-graduate employment. Undergraduates will be matched with a professional engineer for a series of semester-long activities that includes structured one-on-one meetings and monthly group workshops. Both mentors and protégés will complete tailored training on best practices to cultivate their one-on-one developmental relationships. The mentoring strategy will be administered and evaluated over three years for distinct cohorts of mentor/protégé pairs. A quasi-experimental design will be used to compare student outcomes of mentored students to matched non-mentored peers. The second project goal aims to add to the cumulative research on academic mentoring by investigating how specific aspects of mentor support (psychosocial vs. instrumental support) predict distinct protégé outcomes. Drawing from mentoring and instructional science research, the project aims to test a model linking specific mentor behaviors to corresponding student outcomes. Data collection includes pre/post surveys, archival academic records, and mentor ratings. The mentoring strategy will be refined annually through formative feedback (using external program evaluation), and the approach and research findings will be disseminated through conferences, peer-reviewed publications, and digital platforms to promote national adoption. This mentoring approach is intended to benefit other STEM disciplines at both the University of Memphis and universities nationwide. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.